תוכן מסופק על ידי Virginia Sole-Smith. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי Virginia Sole-Smith או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלהם. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.
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This week, in what might be the funniest episode yet, Molly and Emese are joined by co-stars Amy Schumer and Brianne Howey. They get candid about motherhood, career evolution, and their new film, Kinda Pregnant —which unexpectedly led to Amy’s latest health discovery. Amy opens up about how public criticism led her to uncover her Cushing syndrome diagnosis, what it’s like to navigate comedy and Hollywood as a mom, and the importance of sharing birth stories without shame. Brianne shares how becoming a mother has shifted her perspective on work, how Ginny & Georgia ’s Georgia Miller compares to real-life parenting, and the power of female friendships in the industry. We also go behind the scenes of their new Netflix film, Kinda Pregnant —how Molly first got the script, why Amy and Brianne were drawn to the project, and what it means for women today. Plus, they reflect on their early career struggles, the moment they knew they “made it,” and how motherhood has reshaped their ambitions. From career highs to personal challenges, this episode is raw, funny, and packed with insights. Mentioned in the Episode: Kinda Pregnant Ginny & Georgia Meerkat 30 Rock Last Comic Standing Charlie Sheen Roast Inside Amy Schumer Amy Schumer on the Howard Stern Show Trainwreck Life & Beth Expecting Amy 45RPM Clothing Brand A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us at @sonypodcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…
תוכן מסופק על ידי Virginia Sole-Smith. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי Virginia Sole-Smith או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלהם. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.
An anti-diet, fat positive community about body liberation. And good snacks.
תוכן מסופק על ידי Virginia Sole-Smith. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי Virginia Sole-Smith או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלהם. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.
An anti-diet, fat positive community about body liberation. And good snacks.
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is the great . Helen is a staff writer at The New Yorker . She has been covering food for more than a decade as a writer and editor, and won a 2024 James Beard Award for her weekly restaurant-review column, The Food Scene . She is an expert on sandwiches and many other important subjects. recteamnyc A post shared by @recteamnyc And I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Helen last month at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn (hi thank you so much for having us!!), at a live event to celebrate the paperback release of Fat Talk . (They should still have a few signed copies in stock if you need one!) We talked about the book, of course, but we talked about so many other fat- and food-adjacent topics, that I knew I wanted to bring it to you as a podcast episode. (Bear with some imperfect audio, since we weren’t recording with our usual set-up — but Tommy worked his magic as usual so it’s still highly listen-to-able!) If you find today’s episode valuable, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription ! Subscribe now Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!) 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 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! This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast! You’ll find all of the links aggregated here. Episode 180 Transcript Thank you Kim Baldwin for this cute pic of the livestream! Helen I was telling Virginia backstage—and this is true—I read a lot, but I'm a really bad nonfiction reader. I tend to feel like nonfiction books—I shouldn't say this in a bookstore, all nonfiction books are great. You should buy all of them. But I think there's a tendency for nonfiction books to have one really, really good idea and then say it over and over again for 300 pages. It’s like, this could have been a tweet. But I read every single page of this book in total joy. Actually, a lot of it was anger, but it flew by. It is such a great book. It’s funny and smart and so rigorous and has exactly the right kind of anger that is also transmuted into exhortation and action, and it made me feel really good about myself and hopeful by the end. I think that’s the best thing any book can do. Order FAT TALK from Books Are Magic! Virginia Where were you when we were getting blurbs? Because that was amazing. Thank you so much. That really means a lot. Helen It’s really exciting for me to be talking to you about this. I’m a newish parent. I don’t know at what point I just call myself a parent instead of a new parent? I have a two year old. Virginia I think you’re getting there. Helen But this came out right on time for me. Shortly after my daughter was born this was sitting in my stack of prominently placed books in my living room, and my mother was visiting. She just sort of touched it and looked at it. It was like watching a deer approach— Virginia Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it. Helen Don’t look right at it. My mom, who was born in 1952 and who eats four almonds as a snack, literally. And it happened! Like, it happened. This is a great book, but it is also such a good passive aggressive prop. Virginia I really thought about that a lot in my cover design. How will this look on people’s coffee tables when their moms come over? And I think it’s eye catching with the yellow so you want to pick it up, but then you see “fat,” and you’re like, oh my God, what’s happening. It brings up a lot for the moms. But I’ve heard this story a few times, and it gives me a lot of hope. Helen I assume it had a good impact. I mean, we haven’t directly discussed it. Virginia No, no. No one’s saying that has to happen. Helen One of the things that was really striking for me about this book that I want to talk to you about is the fact that it is a parenting book. I assume everybody is here because you are on some fundamental level interested in the concepts of body liberation and fat activism and the notion of the inherent dignity of the body, and how do we untie the knots of garbage that have prevented our society from allowing that to just simply be. Virginia That’s just the baseline. Everybody’s there? Good. Helen So what is the function and what is the effect and what does it do to frame that as a conversation about parenting? Virginia I love this question. There are a couple things that made it end up being a parenting book. One is, when you are a writer who is a mom, people then assume you’re a parenting writer. So it was a path I was on a little bit, somewhat reluctantly. But the bigger thing was: There are so many important voices in the fat activism space. There’s , there’s Sonya Renee Taylor, there’s , there are just so many people who I’ve been learning from for years. So when I thought about what can I contribute to the conversation—you know, I am a multiply privileged white woman. I’m a small fat woman. There are many parts of this conversation that I should not be centered in, that I do not own, and shouldn’t be taking up space in. Share But there wasn’t a book about how to talk about anti-fat bias with kids, how to think about this issue as a parent. And because I was writing in a lot of parenting spaces, and because I am a parent, I knew that this issue is something parents are terrified of and really deeply struggling with. So I felt like, well, this is the place I can contribute to the larger work of body liberation. I can take my background as a health journalist and parenting writer and all of that, and bring it into this space. And my book editor—who’s here!—also doesn’t really love parenting books. So this is something we talked about a lot, is not necessarily wanting to be a parenting book, but how do we help parents. But the really beautiful thing that’s happened since the book came out is that I hear from a lot of folks who are not parents who read it and say “This is helping me reparent myself around these issues.” So I think just framing the conversation as, how would we talk to kids about this? How would we advocate for children about this? that helps people start to think, “Well, what didn’t I get as a kid? Who didn’t stand up for me? Who didn’t advocate for me?” That gives you permission to start really dealing with some of that and sitting with some of that. That’s been the the cool thing. It is a parenting book, but I think it doesn’t have to be. You can be parenting yourself, and that’s part of it, too. Helen This is maybe the big and unanswerable question. But I feel like this is cover-to-cover just chock full of irrefutable scientific studies and rigorously researched and peer reviewed data that shows that raising kids in diet culture is massively more harmful to them than whatever physical effects, primary or secondary, being overweight might do to them. So why is this still even a conversation? The whole focus in contemporary parenting—I assume this is always with the focus in parenting, but the way that the internet and our cultural trajectories have have allowed things to really become so filtered and focused, this obsession with optimization, right? Like, “I want my kid to have the perfect toy, the perfect book,” like… Virginia The best preschool. Helen Everything has to be the best. Here is this abundance of data showing how to create someone who is best set up to be emotionally healthy, physically healthy, psychologically healthy. And then our entire society is like, nah, fuck that. Like, what? How do we reconcile that? Virginia I mean, it’s money, right? What you just said doesn’t make pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars. Raising children to be emotionally and physically healthy and feel safe in their bodies—that’s not the economy of Denmark. Novo Nordisk is. So that’s the bottom line. Weight loss has always been an incredibly profitable business model. Not a successful business model, right? Like, people lose some weight, but then they regain it. But that’s the profit. Helen Well, the business is successful. Virginia Yes, the business is successful. The weight loss is not successful, which is what makes the business successful. Subscribe now So that’s what we’re up against. And it’s really frustrating because to do this book, I talked to so many mainstream obesity researchers, so many doctors, so many people who really do I think in their hearts—not all of them. Not the Novo Nordisk guys—but in their hearts, I think a lot of people are like, “We’re really concerned about children’s health. We’re really concerned about raising rates of diabetes.” And they think they’re approaching this from the right place. Because they just haven’t drilled into the fact that most of the science getting done on this, is rooted in anti-fat bias and capitalism. So until our entire healthcare system is open to a major reckoning where they look at that, that’s not going to change. We’re always going to be slamming against that brick wall. Helen One of the tensions I feel like you try to navigate throughout this book is the relationship between what we can do as individuals, within our families, within our friend groups, and what we can’t do, because there is a system. We can want the system to change, and we can work on our way for the system to change, but the system is much greater than we are. So as a parent, but also as a person who is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world probably about this whole thing, where does that leave us? Is it really going to make a difference if I have a fat child, if my child grows up to be fat, if I say all of the right things and create exactly the right space for her, and then she still goes out into a world that is equipped to make her feel like crap? Virginia The world will tell our kids all of these terrible things. The world tells all of us these terrible things about our bodies. But if you can have this foundation to come back to, and for kids, if they can know that home is a safe space, it does make a difference. Your daughter will know you’re never going to expect her to change her body. And that just gives her more options. And like, I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I had in the ‘90s. It’s not what I had as a middle schooler and as a high schooler. It was like, “No, obviously, change your body.” Leave a comment Helen I can’t believe I’m about to use a sports analogy, because I don’t do that. Virginia I’m uncomfortable that we’re going there, but okay. Helen I’m also probably going to get the terms wrong. But you know how professional swimmers shave their entire bodies right before the actual meet? But they do all their training with their body hair. So they’ve trained with drag and then when they go out in the world, they’re super strong, and they’re ready to go. Virginia Yes! I thought that was a beautiful metaphor for the book, and for the experience it gives you navigating this. Helen Walking with weights? I don’t even, I don’t know. So I read this when it first came out, when I was a brand new parent, like I had a seven pound potato. Virginia I’m just impressed you were reading at that point. Helen I don’t know how much I retained. Virginia I was just watching a lot of Gilmore Girls reruns at that stage of my parenting. Helen And then I reread it, a month or two ago now, as the parent of a toddler, and it’s been interesting for me to trace the arc of my own relationship to my body, becoming a parent. I sort of optimistically was like, “It’s not going to change me. I’m just going to poop out a baby and I’ll continue being me.” And it’s not the pregnancy that changed me, or the parenting even that changed me. It’s that there is now a person where I am acutely aware at all times that I am the model. And I share that modeling with my husband. But like, I am a model. And I thought I was really good at not doing negative self talk. And now I’m acutely aware of it. Oh my God, it’s everywhere. Like, I hate myself. What has happened? I didn’t realize how much of this was there. Like, I get Botox, but then I stopped getting Botox because I was, like, she’ll know. Share Virginia Two year olds being famously good at spotting Botox. Helen The level of self-parenting that reading parenting books has asked of me has been really healing and exciting, and also a little bit annoying and terrible. Virginia That seems right. Helen Have you had an arc of change in the two years since the book has been out? Your relationship to the book itself, or the way that you feel like people have reacted to it? Virginia I mean, I said to you backstage that I didn’t want to talk about Ozempic because I’m tired of it. [To audience] Don’t worry, if you have Ozempic questions, it’s fine we can do it in the Q&A. But obviously, the big thing that happened in the two years since the book came out is that Ozempic has really dramatically changed the way diet culture and weight loss gets talked about. So what I will say is that I think it has made two things clear to me. One is what we’re up against, and that this is, again, a multi-billion dollar industry that is relentless. The fact that they’re marketing these drugs to kids, that they’re testing them on six year olds now—it’s very clear that the priorities are not health. The priority is how do we make as much money off these drugs as possible. And that is something I can see and talk about, and that’s fine. The second thing is more nuanced, but the more I thought about what body liberation means and what we’re fighting for here, the more I realized we have to hold space for the fact that everyone gets to make their own choices about Ozempic. And if that drug is the right drug for you, if weight loss of any kind feels necessary for you, then you will never hear me say that that was not the right choice for you. And I think I had to start talking about the book and talking to people about the book to really get to that level of nuance. Because what I started to understand is how much we all live with anti-fatness in all these different ways. It shows up in our lives in so many different ways. And so I don’t get to say, you should all be okay with living with this amount of anti-fatness. Until we can fix it for everyone, we all have to put up with this. Because I don’t know everyone’s individual lives. Often weight loss is necessary for fat folks to access medical care or to access clothing or an access job opportunities. And that’s because we’re talking about a systemic set of barriers. So I think that’s the nuance that I now bring to it. How do we talk about this as a system? How do we critique the system? How do we not critique individuals? That nuance, I think, is something I’m still finding and wrapping my brain around. Leave a comment Helen That’s a really tough one because the system, while it exists as its own self perpetuating entity, is created and maintained by individuals, right? They’re not abstract, faceless people. We all contribute in our own ways to all these little systems and then there are the big, horrible architects. Virginia Well, it’s like what you said about not wanting your two-year-old to spot your Botox. I so get that, because I have two daughters and any beauty work I engage in in front of them, I feel like I have to disclaim “This is something I’m opting into, but it’s beauty labor, and it’s not fair that women are expected to put on makeup and do our hair like this to go out into the world. And, you notice your father doesn’t have to do any of this to leave the house!” And they’re just like, okay, really mom? Helen It’s makeup and it’s Mommy’s discourse and praxis! Virginia Also, it makes me happy?! I’m trying to tease out how much of it is my own joy versus the male gaze. I don’t know. Helen Are they even extractable from each other? Virginia So yes, all of these individual choices are also us performing in diet culture and performing in patriarchy. But I think we are all allowed to do our own math there, is where I’ve landed. Helen It’s kind of amazing to me. I was like, how much this is such a sophomore year stoned thing to realize, but how much everything is just the one thing, right? Like, diet culture and the patriarchy and homophobia and queerphobia, all of racism, all of it is just the same thing. It’s just like, actually your body doesn’t have any impact on how much respect you deserve. And it’s wild, how much wrapping that needs to have, and how granular the getting ahead of objections needs to be. I think this is where it gets very sophomore year stoned. But it’s like, once you see it, you see it everywhere. It’s like the spider web is everywhere, and every twitch of a strand twitches everything else. And it’s just like, well, no, this is really easy, actually. Like, it’s super easy. We solved it. We just have to be cool. Virginia Just be cool. Helen Just be cool. And then it turns out that’s actually incredibly complicated. Like, listen, I know that the entire medical profession has institutionalized fatphobia, but you’re gonna be cool. Virginia No, I think that’s completely it. What I often hear from folks who are on this journey of suddenly seeing the matrix, is you can do this thing where you then are trying to be perfect about not participating in diet culture. But it’s like, no, no. That’s diet culture that told you you had to be perfect. So it’s okay if you’re messing up a lot. I’ll have readers write in and be like, “I can’t show my four year old Peppa Pig because there’s so much fat shaming of Daddy Pig.” And yeah there sure is, but you also need to put cartoons on so you can make dinner, man. Talk about it later, and if you don’t talk about it this time, it’s fine. There will be other opportunities to name anti-fatness for your children. So I think we can get perfectionist about wanting to keep our kids in this bubble of not being exposed to all the big, scary things. I mean, now that I have a middle schooler, this is the whole conversation with social media and phones and all of that. And it’s like, okay, yes on one hand, I would love to throw it all into the sea and not have her ever do any of that, as someone who has to spend too much time on Instagram. You know what it’s like, it’s a dark place. But on the other hand, we need to give them the tools to navigate this. And they’re only going to be able to learn to do that by doing it to a certain extent and by spotting it and having their own relationship to it. Subscribe now Helen It reminds me of a concept you come back to a lot the book, this idea that restriction creates obsession and fixation. It’s almost like inoculating yourself to the poison by taking a tiny dose. Like, if we can learn how to function within a society where fatphobia or diet culture is normalized in various places, it allows us to reinforce our sense of what the right way to behave is—not right in a moral sense. Virginia What aligns with your values. Helen Exactly. I’m a food writer. I’m a restaurant critic. I’ve been a food writer for decades now. My relationship to food is different in a lot of ways than most people’s. For professional reasons, I have to be obsessed with food. I get paid to be obsessed with food. And that is really bizarre. It often doesn’t come into conflict with my sense of myself and my body, I think because I have a moderately, decently healthy sense of myself and my body. But when it does come into conflict, it’s wild. I’m like, oh my God. I have to go out to dinner. I have to go to fancy restaurants and eat and it’s the thing that I am praised for. And then simultaneously, it’s also a thing that leads to a bodily result that I am punished for. We’re just having a therapy session. Virginia No, but I’m so interested in this. Helen I don’t even know what my question is. I’m just talking. Virginia Can I ask you a question? Because I’m so curious about this, because it’s quite common for people who work with food or write about food, to be a little weird about food. And it’s understandable because of what you’re saying. Like, there is all this mixed messaging. There’s this need to revel in it. But also… Helen There’s this thing in food that if you work in food media, you sort of very quickly understand. It’s never quite said explicitly, but food media is about everything that happens until you swallow. So it’s about preparing, it’s about shopping. It’s about plating, looking at it, taking the bite, tasting the flavors. But as soon as you swallow, and we start talking about what happens once it hits your body, it becomes health writing. It’s not food writing. Share Virginia This makes so much sense. Helen So there’s a really fascinating disconnect. There’s food as an aesthetic and cultural property. And then there’s food as the actual fuel of your body . Or something, even if it’s not fuel, the pleasure, whatever it converts in your body to something physical. And that is just not the purview of food writing or food media. Virginia Does that make it easier then? Because you’re like, “I don’t have to think about all of that.” Or is it all still there, just unspoken. Helen It makes it easier in the way that compartmentalization does. And like all compartmentalization, it will eventually fail. Leave a comment Virginia Right. This is a personal question, so if you don’t want to answer it, you can reject it. But do you find that your body becomes a subject of discussion as a food writer? Like does that come up for you at all? Helen It has historically. Once, a while ago, I was approached by a book agent who was like, “I have a great book idea for you. You should write a nonfiction, personal, first person book about being a fat food writer.” And I was like, well, what about it? Virginia That’s an idea that doesn’t make 400 pages. Helen And he was sort of like, “Oh, I don’t know.” Virginia Just seemed cool, I guess. Helen I eat. I put the food into my body. Footnote, the body is fat . This sounds like sour grapes, and I have no idea what my life would have been like if I were thin. But, you know, I’m pretty sure that I’ve probably missed out on some media opportunities. But I don’t think that’s because I’m fat. I think it’s because I have a squishy potato face. So, like, I don’t know. Virginia We’ll come back to that later. Helen Like, yes and no, right? I think that there are ways in which being a fat person hurts you professionally regardless of the industry that you’re in, right? Like, men who work in food who are fat are considered to be garrulous gourmands, right? They get to be evidence of a life well-lived, a man of appetites, right? And a woman who’s fat is either going to be totally desexualized and we can go into a big sidebar about this, but the way that women are allowed to be physically embodied as famous food people is really interesting. Either you’re really hot and sexy and fuckable, or you’re a totally desexualized, either mother figure, or a de-gendered kind of Julia Child. Leave a comment Virginia Is this explaining all the thin blonde food influencers? Helen Yes. But the thing with the thin blonde food influencers is there are also so many thin blonde anything influencers, right? Virginia There’s something there though. I just was curious about this, because we know: Fat people get comments in restaurants. We get comments on what we order, whether it’s our mothers, whether it’s waiters. So I just wondered if that’s something you’re navigating. Helen I think that I’ve been very lucky. I can’t think of a specific instance where I felt like I’ve been judged—at least to my awareness, because I’m quite oblivious—for what I’ve ordered or how I eat. Physically, I can say like I’m a small fat and going to restaurants can be physically difficult, especially in New York, because the tables are so close together, and my ass is not even that huge. But my ass is bigger than they design restaurants for. I have knocked over countless water glasses with my hips and going through the tables or trying to navigate fixed booths. The physical architecture of restaurants is something I’m very, very aware of. I wrote a thing a couple years ago about chairs with high weight limits and why don’t more restaurants go for that, especially once outdoor dining started happening during the first few years of the pandemic. I was so furious by how many outdoor dining structures were using either those nightmarish Tolix chairs with the side that’s that just like, “would you like to have your sciatic nerve cut in half? We can provide that.” Virginia And you’re sliding off the whole time. Helen Or just the cheapo IKEA folded half chairs that have a weight limit of 14 ounces. And they’re just a nightmare. And I understand that restaurants are among the most precarious businesses with just no safety net. But it is always really interesting to me to notice which restaurants put thought into accessibility broadly, right? Not just for customers of different body sizes, but also physical accessibility. A lot of restaurants, due to the size of their businesses and things like that, are often exempt from ADA requirements, for example. So that’s been more of a thing than eating in public. I think in terms of eating in public, I just do it. I like food a lot. Subscribe now Virginia I mean, it’s great. Helen I have felt shame, but most of that I would locate in, like, high school. Virginia I mean, you don’t have to write the fat food writer memoir. But, I do think that representation matters. And you being a public figure in this job is really great. Helen To bridge our two worlds, the thing with food is, it is a source of pleasure. And I think that the way that we pathologize bodies, and the way that we use the word wellness and all of its insidious and popular meanings, fundamentally sidesteps the fact that food is a source of joy, both in terms of the flavors and textures, and the actual food itself and the act of eating together. It’s something that you talk about in the book, is the mental health effect of just participating with your friends eating a birthday cake together instead of freaking out about the sugar content. It is important to be connected to one another, and we can write as many listicles as a society as we want, about ways to hang out without food or like whatever diet culture things people want to do. There are so many of them. Diet culture is always like, “go for a walk.” But it’s better to go for a walk with a popsicle. Virginia A walk and a treat! A walk and a treat! Share Helen And there’s a reason for that! Like, evolutionarily. And we don’t have to do our biology, right? If there’s one thing that being human means, it is that your intellect is allowed to supersede your biological impulses. However, in the same way that hunger is our most powerful impulse, the relief of hunger is a powerful mode of connection. When we relieve our hunger with other people, we become connected to them. This isn’t woo, this is like neuroscience. Eating together is actually connection. To try to fabricate ways to connect without that because we are scared of eating, is being scared of being together. Virginia 100 percent. I love that. Helen I feel very passionate! Virginia Maybe that’s your book! And just to bring it back to the parenting conversation, this is what I see parents struggling with all the time because there’s so much pressure on how we’re supposed to feed our kids in this really hyper perfect way. Like the rainbow bento box lunches. Helen Oh my God, yeah. Virginia And family dinner. There is so much pressure on the concept of family dinner needing to be executed in this certain way. And it really is just what Helen was saying. All that needs to be happening is two people are sharing a meal. Doesn’t matter what the food is. What matters is that you’re having that opportunity for connection. And you know, one of the lessons of working on this book that I’ve been able to take into my own life is really giving no effs anymore about nutrition with my kids, which I get a lot of criticism for on the Internet . And I’m comfortable with that. Because what I want my kids coming away from the dinner table with is, number one, their body felt safe, and was treated with dignity and respect. So no means no, if you don’t want to eat something. And number two, that we had some opportunity for connection. Which, again, I have a middle schooler. Like, it’s hard to have connection with them a lot of the time, and they don’t want to talk about their day at the dinner table. But if the food is something she likes, that’s going to get me closer! And it’s hard, because even for me doing this work and believing all of that quite passionately, there are a lot of nights where I look at our dinner table and think, if the Internet could see this…. Like, I’m failing a lot of the time. And it is what it is. But we have that core connection. Leave a comment Helen Also, it doesn’t have to be every day, right? Sitting down together as a family, like, whatever, the research is unimpeachable. But also it’s not every single day forever, right? I don’t know how you would do a study for this, but I suspect that what’s more important than actually sitting together at a table is being the kind of family that would eat together and cultivating the kind of environment where you all think, should we all sit together at a table? Like, that’s the thing that really. Virginia Which, in order to be that kind of family, sometimes that means we’re going to watch TV while we eat dinner. Helen It’s going to be at the coffee table, right? But it’s a table. Virginia We’re watching Tangled for the 900th time or whatever, because that’s the energy level we all have, and that’s what’s letting us connect as a family tonight. Helen I think we’re going to take audience questions now. So I have this very adorable niece, a little doll of a girl. And one year, when I went to visit her, she had just gotten much bigger. Hefty. And I felt pain, and I swear on a Bible, it’s not because I care what she looks like, but I felt that it was going to make her life harder just because of thin being the ideal. And when she gets a little older and she cares about things, wanting to be attractive or whatever. That she wouldn’t like herself. So obviously, that’s a terrible societal thing, but assuming it wasn’t going to change by the time she grew up. I just I was surprised at how much myself, I wish she had not gotten bigger. So is this another thing that you talk about in the book? That it’s not just “you shouldn’t be fat,” but it can come out of caring for the girl? Virginia I think that is most parents of kids in bigger bodies, most adults in the lives of kids with bigger bodies, it’s not “I’m repulsed to look at you.” Sometimes it is that. I’m not going to say that’s not a reality of anti-fatness. But much more, it’s “I love you so much, and I’m worried your life will be harder.” That is a totally understandable place to start, because you know the world, and you know that the lives of fat people are harder. But the problem is, if we then say, “So, let’s change her body to make life easier,” we’ve told her that the bullies are right, that her body is the problem to solve. And that’s not the message. The message is your body is not a problem. We live in a world that’s going to give you a different message. I’m here to protect you. I’m here to advocate with you. What do you need from me? We love and support this kid in the body they have and we work on the world. Because that’s what needs to change. Well, I must say that to me, makes your book seem very important. That comment comes from someone who’s as old as your mother! Helen Thank you. This is a really important book. If any of you haven’t read it, you should read it cover to cover. It’s great. It’s really good. I think it’s totally cool to be the age of my mother, by the way. Many of our mothers—probably your mother, too!—were raised with an incredibly restrictive notion of what a woman was allowed to be. Virginia I mean, it’s just multiple decades of diet culture and patriarchy. Helen Not just diet culture, but like, how do you get a husband? Because you have to have a husband. How do you keep your husband? How do you maintain your household? I look upon my mother and her relationship to her body to food with a lot of generosity, and a lot of compassion. I feel lucky that I get to have the relationship to my body and to food and to the culture of food that I get to have, and I see how much space she’s covered in the course of her life, accommodating to a world that has changed around her. Virginia I have lots of readers who are my mother’s age, and I love hearing from women in their 60s, 70s who are doing this work and learning. It’s not like it’s ever too late. We all deserve body liberation. Thank you. Subscribe now So kind of related to that question, I have a two and a half year old daughter and I have a lovely mother in law in her 70s who is really a kind person. She comes with a lot of behaviors that are remnants of being brought up in a time when thinness is really, really important. Things like she has to eat off a small plate, and she has to use a small fork, she has to eat her bread last. These are things that my daughter is seeing, and as much compassion as I have for my mother in law, I’m sort of at an impasse where I don’t know if the next move is to double down and try to fortify my child against the potential impact of those behaviors, or try to talk to my mother in law about those behaviors, which feels kind of cruel because she’s in her 70s. And in a way, she’s been hurt by the same system that’s like getting ready to hurt my my kid. Virginia What I always come down to is the compassion you’re talking about. Lead with the compassion. If you’re watching this person enact this on themselves, I don’t think it’s your job to ask them to change. Maybe as your daughter gets older, you can debrief with her after a visit. Like, “ Isn’t it kind of sad that grandma always uses that tiny plate? I like using a bigger plate for cake. I get more cake that way.” You debrief with your kid, so your kid sees what grandma’s doing and knows that’s not what’s expected of them, that’s not normal. And with your mother-in-law, you just continue to have a loving relationship with her, and make it clear in any way you can that you don’t expect this from her. Where I suggest talking directly to the grandparent is if they’re saying things about your child’s body. That’s different. Then you intervene and advocate on behalf of your kid. Leave a comment I’m a parent of a 16 year old, the child of an 80 year old. So those are fascinating conversations. But the parenting in the age of diet culture, I feel like it could also be parenting and teaching in the age of diet culture. A lot of my listening was as an educator in terms of, like, it’s not exclusively a parenting book. It’s also a guide for teachers. Can you speak to that? Virginia I feel really strongly that this is a book I want in the hands of as many teachers as possible. There’s a whole chapter on anti-fatness in schools. It’s systemic, with the kinds of health class calorie counting assignments that come up. But it’s also the culture of the schools, the way teachers might casually reference their own diets. It’s when they’re putting together a syllabus, how many books center fat protagonists? Not that many, because we don’t have enough books like that. (There are more, a lot of them are sold here!) But, that’s a work in progress, especially depending what age you’re teaching. So I think the book is a tremendous resource for teachers. And there are several teachers quoted in that chapter who have put their own resources on the internet, and I think are making efforts to connect with other educators. So I love it when teachers come to events. Thank you! Share I’m a pediatric dietitian, and I have your book on my desk so medical professionals know what I’m about when they pass by. I have families come to me, and I feel like they’re very much expecting me to say one thing, and then they’re kind of blown away when I don’t, and it’s also exciting in that way. But my question is, when I have teen patients, it’s easy to talk to the teens separately and then talk to parents separately about how we talk about food and how we can change that at home. But when I have kids who are under 13, and I’m working with their parents and the kids in the same room together, what are your recommendations for navigating changing how we talk about food and body image? When I have the parent in front of me and I have the young kiddo in front of me too. Virginia That is really tricky. You have a really important job, and thank you. I think whatever age kid you’re dealing with, it’s great for them to hear you saying what you’re going to say about food. If you’re presenting the idea of food as nourishment and pleasure, and you’re pushing back against weight loss plans and all of that, then anything you’re saying to the parent, even if the parent is getting uncomfortable or arguing with you, like, it’s great that the kid is getting to hear this perspective. So I think I wouldn’t worry too much about filtering. Just also coming back to giving the kid as many opportunities to feel empowered about it as possible, whatever choices make sense to give to the kid. And the framework you’re talking about. I think it’s kind of great you’re having the conversation in front of the kid, honestly, although I can imagine there are conversations that are really challenging in that job. Leave a comment Can I break the Ozempic rule? Celebrities and pop culture and idols have always been celebrated for being thin, but this is the first time there’s been this $1,000 a month drug that makes people thinner. So then, thinness and its relationship to class and celebrity has changed. So like, I’m here to get the book. I haven’t read it, but. Do you have any thoughts on how that changes how people idolize celebrities? Or is it the same thing? Virginia I think Ozempic is just making obvious what has always been true, which is that a celebrity body is the product of time and money. More time, more money, some genetic luck, more money. Any thin celebrity is just a physical manifestation of all the money that has gone into all of the whatever they’re doing to maintain that body. So in a way, I really appreciate those conversations about who is taking what drug, because it just makes all of this more obvious. It makes the anti-fatness more obvious. It makes the fact that anti-fatness intersects with classism more obvious. Because when we see the media writing these glowing pieces about “soon anyone can be thin!” it’s like, well, no. There are always going to be fat people. We’re just going to see fatness stratified by class even more. Helen This isn’t quite what you were saying, but from a food media perspective, I feel like there was a story, maybe it’s in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that was, like, “the rise of Ozempic and these drugs mean the end of the snack food industry.” And the answer is no. The way that that these drugs are talked about is so wildly divorced from reality. If you’ve read any of the actual literature about these drugs and how they work, and what kind of impact they have on people’s behaviors and thought processes and hormonal reactions—none of is a silver bullet, right? Even if you take it every week, some people don’t lose weight. You still have to decrease your calorie consumption, increase your exercise. Ozempic isn’t the drug that the narrative wants it to be. I think the drug itself is neutral. Virginia It’s a great diabetes medication! Helen And I read something recently about how it seems to be having extraordinary promise for dealing with substance abuse disorder and there are lots of interesting effects that are coming out. As a drug, I think it is morally neutral, the way all drugs are morally neutral. But the narrative around it is being constructed in ways that tells us a lot about our fatphobia, and diet culture, and the way we hierarchize bodies and the accessibility of those bodies. I think that your question cuts exactly to the core of this. It is always easier to have the ideal body when you are rich. And it is always harder to have the ideal body if you have to focus on anything other than attaining and maintaining that body. So I think I would take everything with a grain of salt, unless it is actually about a scientific study. Because, like, no, Doritos is not going to go out of business. Virginia I have faith we can keep Doritos alive. Maybe a government bailout. I don’t know. Helen The reason there are not plus sizes in store at Old Navy is not because there’s not a demand for them. It’s because old Navy has tried to create a narrative. The realities of demand and money and supply in human bodies has almost nothing to do with this story that is trying to be told about the way that capital is flowing. Thank you so much for your book. I am a health teacher in lower school and middle school. I read it last year, and I feel like I’m armed with such knowledge and permission to teach my classes the way that I do. And I have to talk about so many other things. Like, I talk about stress and regulation and gender and sexuality and all the other sex ed stuff too, but obviously, I really want to talk about food and nutrition. A lot of the kids’ parents come to me and they say, okay, so you’re going to help me stop my kid eating sugar. And I just say, after having read that book, I go, I will not be doing that. I remember you saying something in the book that kids are always getting so many confusing messages about food, right? The clean your plate club, but don’t get too fat. And that just creates this swirling whorl of confusing messages for children. I want to be a safe adult where I’m the health teacher that literally never uses the words “healthy food” or “unhealthy food.” But I also know that I’m very much coming up against the messages that they are getting at home. So where do you feel like is the line between a cool teacher that is a safe place to open their minds to all of these restrictive messages, where’s the line between that and like just being another person where they’re like, I don’t know what the truth is. My Health teacher saying this, I have my parents saying that. Virginia Kind of like our pediatric dietitian friend over there, I’m just so glad you guys are doing this and saying these things to the kids. This is what I am hoping will happen more and more. And I think there are absolutely going to be kids who are confused, right? Who are like, “But my mom is saying we’re going to the gym every day after school, and this doesn’t make sense.” But there is going to be some kid in your class who really needs an adult in their life to say this. And what you say is going to plant a seed that is going to help them navigate what they’re dealing with at home, or what’s to come. You have this amazing opportunity to be the safe adult. And I think you could invite conversation about what other messages they’re getting, not because you’re going to necessarily tell them that’s wrong or argue against it, but to encourage them to start thinking a little more critically, and build some of those skills. So asking, does this make sense to you? How do you feel when this happens? I think that would be like a great opportunity to just have them start exploring the messages. Because what I find with the kids I interact with is they are so good at calling this out once they have a few talking points about this. They’re spotting it everywhere. So I think they’ll be off and running with it for sure. Subscribe now I have a five year old, and this kind of ties into your first book, The Eating Instinct. She has just been diagnosed with ARFID, which, for everyone who doesn’t know what ARFID is, it’s basically like, she just doesn’t feel hungry or thirsty. And I’ve been trying to follow her cues, and if she doesn’t want to eat, she doesn’t have to eat, kind of thing. And now I’m at this point where they’re like, no, she has to eat because she can’t grow if she doesn’t eat. And I am trying to reckon with all of the wonderful body autonomy and like not ever weighing her except for at the pediatricians or whatever. And now I’m supposed to weigh her every two weeks, and I have to count every calorie that she eats. And I know that you went through an even more extreme version with with your first daughter. So I just wanted to know, as your kid has gotten older, and she had to go through the trauma of the tube feeding, which, luckily, my kid is not at that level. But like, I don’t want to cause a problem while trying to fix a problem. Virginia You’re doing a great job. And for anyone who hasn’t read my first book, The Eating Instinct , what launched me into all of this in a lot of ways, is that my older child was on a feeding tube for the first two years of her life, and went through very much what this person is talking about. And what I can say to you now as a parent of an 11-year-old is: You aren’t messing it up. It’s going to be okay. You are in the acute stages of something, and you need to get your child fed, and sometimes that’s going to feel like you’re doing the opposite of honoring her body autonomy, but you’re keeping her thriving, and that’s what matters the most. Because you’re going to be coming at it from this framework of, whenever I can, I’m supporting her body autonomy. Whatever choice I can give her, I am giving her that choice. I’ll put her on the scale, but she won’t see the number. You can keep that talk away from her. She’s going to get through this, she deserves to have a great relationship with food . If that means she eats four things or 40 things in her life, then you’re doing an amazing job. Helen One more question! I also have two young daughters, and it’s very challenging trying to both raise them in a way that you know you can eat whatever you want, and you know food is neutral, and there’s no good or bad or unhealthy healthy. But sometimes I’ll look at what my daughter has eaten today, just cookies or just foods that are generally thought of, that you’re supposed to have less of or something like that. And I don’t know that I think that’s so bad, but I feel like I get faced with, like, well, don’t you care about her health? And like, isn’t this bad for her nutrition? And I’m like, I don’t think she’s going to get scurvy? But I don’t know where that line is. Like, am I’m overdoing it on, eat whatever you want, and actually putting her health at risk. Because I kind of keep going out to, like, I don’t know, you can have candy for breakfast. Like, that’s not going to have a major health effect. Virginia I mean, as you just heard from this other mom, and me: Having a kid who eats is a privilege and something to be celebrated and treasured . So that’s our starting point. And I did really dive into the pediatric nutrition research for the book. There’s a lot more to it, in the book. The biggest thing I took away from the research is that what matters for kids’ nutritional needs is having enough to eat. That’s what matters the most. So if your kid is getting enough to eat, they will, over the course of a week, get enough nutrition. I have one child, I have to look sometimes, over the course of several weeks, and then be like, oh yeah, there was that green vegetable a couple Thursdays ago. They will hit their nutritional needs. There will be more variety than you see when we look at that day that’s only cookies. I call those snake days, where they just eat massive quantities of one food. You know, like, how a snake eats the whole rodent and then doesn’t eat for like, a week. That is a normal eating pattern for a lot of children. So there’s a lot in the book that will give you more facts if you need that. But I think the biggest takeaway is: If kids have enough to eat, if they know their body is safe and loved in their home, then we’re all doing a great job. Helen If I can, with no expertise, weigh in on another aspect of your question, where you’re like, “But people say, are you poorly parenting your child?” Like, who the fuck are those people? My husband is right here. Virginia Okay, we’ll talk after. Helen Sir, are you a registered dietitian? No? Okay! Virginia I think we solved that! Helen Thank you guys. This was incredible. This was awesome. This book is amazing. If you haven’t read it, you should read it. And if you’ve already read it, you should read it again. Virginia Valentine’s Day is coming! Buy one for your loved ones. Helen Nothing says I love you more than healing your own relationship to your body and food so that you can pass that to your child! Leave a comment The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram ) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus , and Big Undies . The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe . Our theme music is by Farideh . Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism! Share…
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay , and it’s time for your February Indulgence Gospel. Today we’re updating you on our great experiment: How did we do with 30 days of NO AMAZON? We’re going to get into: ⭐️ Why did we quit Amazon in the first place? ⭐️ Is quitting Amazon a diet—or at least, diet culture-adjacent? ⭐️ What was our biggest fail? ⭐️ Will we keep going??? To hear the full story, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber . Subscriptions are $7 per month or $70 for the year. picture alliance / Contributor for Getty Images Read more…
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is . Frankie is an award-winning journalist whose work sits at the intersection of sports, gender and culture. They are the co-author of Hail Mary, the rise and fall of the National Women’s Football League , and their writing has been featured in The New York Times , Sports Illustrated , The Atlantic and more. Frankie also writes , a newsletter about queer sports and pop culture, which I consider a must-subscribe. If you have been remotely following the issues of trans women in sports, you likely already know how well Frankie calls out that bias and discrimination. As Frankie points out, the way bodies are policed and controlled in the sports world is really just a microcosm of how the bodies of queer, trans, and otherwise marginalized folks are being policed and controlled throughout our culture right now. So even if you think you don’t care about sports, I promise you’ll care about this conversation. If you find today’s episode valuable, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription ! Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!) Subscribe now 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 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 178 Transcript Frankie My name is Frankie de la Cretaz. I am an independent journalist, and my work mostly sits at the intersection of sports, gender, and culture. Virginia Even if you identify as a deeply un-athletic and not-sports-fluent person, such as myself, Frankie’s work will make you understand sports in a whole new way—and how much it intersects with politics, culture, everything else that’s going on. So everyone needs to subscribe to . Frankie I appreciate that. I actually consider myself someone who writes about sports for people who don’t think they care about sports , so I’m glad that’s coming across. Virginia We’re going to talk about something that you’ve been writing about for a long time, which is the potential of sports to be fat positive, and the many barriers in place there. But before we go there: I want to acknowledge we are having this conversation a day after the inauguration. It’s going to drop about a week out from the inauguration. It’s a rough time in America right now. And one of Trump’s first presidential actions was to publish an executive order that I have had to read three or four times because it is so jarring to see such anti-trans, misogynist language on the White House website. So Frankie, how are you? Where are we? How are you doing? Frankie I mean, as a trans person, generally, this sucks. But as a journalist who has been documenting the rise of transphobia and anti-trans rhetoric in this country, I’m not surprised. We have been saying for a while that the goal of anti-trans sport legislation is actually this, what we’re seeing—which is to legislate trans people out of existence . This was the ultimate goal of the rightwing anti-trans groups that pushed all of this legislation that now exists in over half of the states Because sports was the place where they could make trans people, and trans women in particular, seem threatening. They could couch it in language around fairness, and advantage, and the real marginalization that cis women, and women in general, have faced over time. So sports became the acceptable place for prejudice and discrimination to happen. But the thing is, once you make trans people or any group of people a threat in one arena, it becomes much easier to make them a threat in other arenas. So a lot of these bills attempted to redefine biological sex. A lot of states that passed these anti-trans sports bills went on to pass more extreme anti-trans legislation against healthcare and education and things like that. So I think there’s this very direct link from the attack on trans people in sports to what we’re seeing now. The other thing I will mention is the reason that so many people were nervous about the bill that the House just passed —which is banning trans women and girls from girls’ school sports—is that bill also has language that defines gender as binary, as one or the other. And we could see the potential for that language to be broadened to all areas of life. And that is what we’re seeing. Leave a comment Virginia That’s what this executive order clearly intends to do. It’s really chilling. And as a cis woman, it makes my skin crawl the way the language is framed as if it is protecting fragile women and girls. As if a president who is a sexual predator and an anti-choice administration has our best interests at heart. Frankie Yes, and I think that’s what makes me as angry as it does, how they have leveraged real marginalization, real harm, real oppression, that women have faced in our society. Instead of pointing the finger at the patriarchy and agents of the patriarchy—often that is cis men—they point the finger at trans women and girls. Even though trans women and girls are actually the most vulnerable and the most likely to be victims of violence. This prevents actual progress for women as a whole, because it pits these two marginalized groups against each other. This has been a really effective strategy of the anti-trans movement. Instead of allowing cis women to see their own protection and freedom as tied up with trans women, and seeing cis women and trans women as part of the same fight, they have pitted them against each other, and it has endangered both groups even more. Virginia It’s dangerous, and it’s just frankly insulting. It’s just like, Trump?? Really?? This known rapist is a heroic protector of women?? I can’t. It’s wild. But obviously, we know there are plenty of women who voted for him. So we have a lot of work to do. But I appreciate you giving us that larger context and helping people understand why it is so important to talk about trans rights in sports, and how that that is the stepping stone that leads to where we are now. Frankie I’ve called it “gateway legislation.” I know that’s making light of something that’s quite serious, but really, the sports legislation has served as that. Because it’s “just sports,” a lot of people didn’t pay attention until it was much too late. Share Virginia Well, not to pivot from one depressing topic to another depressing topic— Frankie Welcome to my beat, Virginia. Virginia This is where we are! But a story you’ve been following that I really want to talk to you about is the rise of weight loss drug advertising during sports events , specifically during WNBA and women’s college basketball. What is going on here? Frankie Great question. Just this past weekend I was watching the new women’s basketball league, Unrivaled , which is so exciting. Until I got an ad for Hers injectable weight loss medication right in the middle. And I was like, Oh, we are continuing the trend, I see. I think there are a few reasons that this happens. I think there’s an assumption that people who watch sports, and particularly women who watch sports, are going to be more health conscious than the average person. And, as you know very well, in our culture, we associate health with thinness. For a long time, coverage of women’s sports was folded into fitness coverage , like Health , Women’s Health , and Fitness —those kinds of magazines. And when we talk about fitness culture, we also are talking about these elements of diet culture and beauty culture that come with it. On top of that, we have this massive boom in women’s sports in terms of funding and sponsorships. Audiences are growing massively. Seemingly every month they’re telling us that there’s hundreds of thousands more people watching women’s sports than there were even like last month. So brands love this, right? They’re desperate to cash in on this audience. So it’s Hers, which is specifically marketed for women, that has this very feminine advertising. Ro is another one that markets explicitly for women. So there’s this insidious thing happening where in women’s sports, we have this narrative of women’s empowerment and “by women for women,” and the way we talk about them. And then you’ve got this women’s medication that continues on this theme. I think all of that is coming together to really make women’s sporting events an appealing place for these drugs to market themselves. Subscribe now Virginia It does really make a sick kind of sense when you lay it out like that. I spent the first decade or so of my career in women’s magazines and writing for places like Self and Fitness , and we regularly featured women athletes, but asked them about their beauty routine and their diet, you know? It was very much like, let’s take this athlete and let’s make sure we talk about her the same way we talk about an actress or a pop star. We want to know her beauty work. We want to know her diet secret. We want to know how she looks so great. So it completely makes sense to take that same framing which was always really patronizing towards these world class athletes, not at all on par with the kinds of questions male athletes get asked, and then assume that the audience is like, “Well, I want to look like her. I need the weight loss drug as well.” Frankie The other piece that’s quite paternalistic is the “see her, be her” theme. This is where we position these pro women athletes as role models for the next generation and as inspiration for little girls. And research has shown that girls ages 12 to 18, are the fastest growing market and viewership for women’s sports. So when you add in the fact that they’re being exposed to these ads, that’s cause for concern, right? Because this is the age group where they’re going to be the most vulnerable to eating disorders. Use of weight loss medications among this age group is also skyrocketing right now. Sometimes that’s for the medical conditions that these medications are designed to treat. But often it’s just because teenage girls who are fat are dealing with so much bullying because of the culture that we live in. So they’re being prescribed these drugs for weight loss. They are the fastest growing age group for these drugs. So these ads feel incredibly insidious. They’re preying on our pre-existing culturally ingrained body anxiety. They’re doing so during these sporting events where we assume that the athletes on the field or the court are able to do what they do— this is implied— because they are in “peak shape.” They are not fat, right? So it’s all just, really icky. Virginia Like, really deeply icky. Frankie I always want to be really clear that the ads that we’re talking about here, they’re not talking about diabetes as the presenting condition. They’re not talking about some other co-morbid or coexisting condition. They’re talking about being fat as the presenting condition. They’re talking about weight loss as the thing they are selling. So this is the difference between marketing for an actual medical condition that these drugs might treat and marketing by fear-mongering about body size. Virginia Yes, super important. I appreciate you teasing that out. Leave a comment It feels like we need to talk about Ilona Maher a little bit in all of this, because she is a peak example of this, of the role model athlete who is inspiring girls. And, you know, I have felt complicated about her. She’s delightful. She has been really outspoken about celebrating that she’s in a bigger body. She is by no means fat. But she’s tall and muscular, and not, kind of, normative, I guess? By some measures? And she did that reel that went viral over the summer, challenging body mass index. So I think a lot of folks spent last summer thinking she represents this major positive sea change for how we think about women’s bodies in sports. But as you and I have discussed on the sidelines, we don’t quite see it this way. Frankie There’s a world in which she could be representing a sea change, but that’s not the world we live in. I feel kind of bad that Ilona Maher gets caught up in this discussion, because I think it’s emblematic of what happens when we talk about individual people rather than systemic issues. She is being used as an example, perhaps unfairly, right? But I think it’s important because she’s straight and she’s white and she’s cis and her body is acceptable, because of what it can do in a sporting context. I think we’ll probably talk a little bit more about this idea as we keep talking about fatphobia in sports. But her body is acceptable because it otherwise conforms to a lot of traditional ideas of femininity. She wears lipstick, and she was on Dancing with the Stars. She’s joked that she wants to be the next Bachelorette, which is really playing up that straightness. Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated source here . Virginia The hair. She’s got very Pretty Girl Hair, for sure. Frankie And that’s fantastic. Ilona Maher is an example of someone who can be both athletic and feminine. But what about athletes who aren’t feminine? Where do they fit in here? We don’t celebrate them in the same way. But also: What choice does Ilona Maher really have here? During the Olympics, she was the subject of speculation over her gender because of her presumed “masculine” qualities. We’re in a time of trans investigations in sports, where we are questioning the gender of women athletes who don’t fit into certain ideas of femininity. So what option does she really have, aside from leaning into that femininity? Especially if she wants to continue to get sponsorships and recognition. So she’s kind of been backed into an impossible corner here. And at the same time, she’s upholding a lot of these really oppressive ideas of femininity. But, through no fault of her own, either. And again, that’s where I think we really run into trouble, is upholding one particular person as emblematic of a systemic change, or a systemic issue, because it’s impossible. Virginia It’s impossible. She kind of can’t get it right. Share Frankie So this is less about actually Ilona Maher and more about the way that culturally, we have responded to her. She’s not the first, or only, woman athlete to put out social media content that challenges beauty norms or body norms. So why is the athlete that we’ve chosen to rally behind the one who is white and straight and cis and all of these more normative factors? There’s a reason that she is the chosen one. Virginia Just to go back to the weight loss commercials piece of it for a second, I realized we didn’t talk about them in the context of men’s sports. Are we not seeing the same trend there in terms of this advertising to male audiences? Frankie Not as far as I can tell. I think what’s important to note here is most of the time, it’s not the leagues who are accepting these commercials. This is different than a team sponsorship. Eli Lilly, who makes a couple of these drugs, is a patch sponsor for the Indiana Fever. The Minnesota Lynx have a local partnership with this weight loss program that their coach is an ambassador for. Those are intentional choices. But when we’re talking specifically about these commercials airing during games, they’re purchased through buying ad inventory. I have checked with the league, and the companies, and this is how they are purchased. So the league doesn’t actually really have the power here to decide whether to accept these ads. The brands choose what events they want to market to based on the demographics of the audiences for those events. This is probably why we’re not seeing that—even though women do watch men’s sports almost equally. Especially the NFL. Over 50 percent of the NFL fans are women. But people are prejudiced and don’t realize that, so we’re not seeing quite that same shift. But there’s something else happening that I think makes women’s sports particularly appealing to advertisers. These leagues present themselves as progressive and committed to gender equality and empowerment and brands actually find that really appealing. They will choose to align with these brands because it can make them look like they’re more committed to these things, too. Not only that, but when women athletes are abrand ambassadors, there’s so much more engagement from consumers. I found this number that I thought was wild, and I wanted to share it because I think this is really important. I think it highlights how dangerous it is that these ads are being able to run during these events: 44 percent of WNBA fans have visited a brand’s website after seeing WNBA sponsorships during a game . Virginia Oh my God. Frankie And 28 percent have bought from a sponsoring brand. Virginia That’s wild. Especially when you consider that you’re watching a show with your eyeballs, and seeing the ad on your TV, and then you have to get out your phone and go to the website. That’s multiple steps people are taking to engage like that. Leave a comment Frankie I’ve also seen something like the three athletes who are most likely to convert consumers are all Black women: Simone Biles, Serena Williams, and Angel Reese. Virginia Interesting. Frankie People trust women athletes because of that role model thing. They trust that they wouldn’t align with a brand who didn’t speak to their values in some way. So they’re more likely to buy things when a woman or a women’s sports league told them that it was okay. Virginia I’m holding my head in my hands because it’s so much darker even than I realized. So okay, we turn these women athletes into our role models. They have to lead the children into the future. And then the weight loss companies are, like, “Perfect! We too would like to be aligned with your progressive values.” Frankie Yes, it’s incredible. They’re like, “We hired this new female commissioner. Oh no, we have allegations of workplace harassment that won’t stop .” Women’s leagues! Feminism! Subscribe now Virginia Oh, my God. It’s so dark. It’s so dark. So that explains why we’re not seeing the same type of advertising at the NFL games. Not that they wouldn’t, because obviously, they’ll follow the women wherever they find them. Frankie They will. And I guess there’s something interesting, too, now that I’ve brought up the NFL, and I think this is related to to things that we’re going to continue to talk about. But you’re much more likely to see fat football players than you are fat basketball players. Like, body diversity exists in basketball, but it’s usually in terms of height, right? You have the players that play in the center, who are 6’ 8” and 6’ 9” and the guards shooting from the perimeter are 5’ 8”. Like, you see that kind of body diversity a lot more. But in a game like football, there’s a lot more body diversity in size, in terms of weight. They don’t talk about football players’ bodies as being lithe. So that may also impact where pharmaceutical companies want to advertise weight loss drugs. Virginia Yeah, so let’s go there a little bit, because I would love to have you talk more about how anti-fatness shows up in sports coverage and discourse, even in these sports where we do see larger bodies centered, like football, like rugby. But there’s still a larger anti-fat narrative coming in. Frankie Totally, right? Because, we just, as a culture, have ideas about who sports are for: Thin people. Which kinds of bodies can be good at sports: Thin bodies. We continue to exclude fat people from narratives about sports, despite the fact that fat people are participating, have participated, and are often excelling at all levels of sport. So these cultural ideas discourage people who are not thin from getting involved in sports at all. But they are also part of how and why eating disorders are so prevalent among athletes. Even in terms of media coverage and how there’s this anti-fat bias woven into it. I think we can go back to the Ilona Maher discussion, right? Because I mentioned her sponsorships. So there’s a lot of things that prevent athletes from getting sponsorships. And in women’s sports, athletes who are more masculine presenting are less likely to get these monies and brand sponsorships. Share But even if you look at men’s sports, we see disparities. Take football. How often do you see a lineman being the face of a team or the face on the Gatorade bottle? That spotlight ges to the quarterback or the running back or the wide receiver. Their contracts with the NFL are also worth more than lineman contracts. And linemen are more likely to play a much shorter time, and to deal with head injuries later in life. So they actually might need the money more. And that running back doesn’t score without the lineman blocking and creating the hole for him to run through. The quarterback doesn’t have time to complete the pass if the linemen don’t do their job. So they’re this really huge part of the success of the players who do get the spotlight, but they don’t get the same kind of attention. And that, to me, is anti-fat bias in action. We don’t think of those men as athletes or as the people we want to represent as the pinnacle of athleticism because of what their bodies look like. Virginia And you will see their weight casually referenced all the time. The fact that they are so big gets invoked in almost a tokenistic way. Frankie Yes, I think about this all the time. I don’t know if people remember this baseball player, his name is Prince Fielder—who is so hot, by the way! I always had a huge crush on him. Virginia Googling now. Frankie Google his photos from the ESPN Body Issue . Prince Fielder in the ESPN Body Issue Because he is a bigger guy who did these photos for the ESPN Body Issue , and the way they were talked about was kind of fascinating. Because the thing that ESPN Body Issue has always done really well—and something I’ve always appreciated about it—is it has done a really good job of representing the diversity of athlete bodies. And Prince Fielder is a baseball player who is much bigger than most of the people that we associate with being baseball players—unless they’re catchers, right? But it was almost like he was a curiosity. People were making fun of the fact that he was featured in this issue. Because men who are fat can be the butt of jokes. So a lot of times, male athletes who are bigger have nicknames about how fat they are, and it’s supposed to be an endearment or a positive thing, but we don’t see that happen with women athletes in the same way. This is the way that anti-fatness shows up for men. Leave a comment Virginia I have a childhood memory of my dad talking about a football player that everyone called “The Fridge” and I can’t remember what team he was on. But he had that name because he was as big as a fridge. That was the joke. And when you just think about that afterwards, it’s like, wow, that’s that’s not a nice name. Frankie Or they’re compared to their smaller teammates. Like, “Can you believe these people are on the same team?” There’s also that inspiration porn thing, which happens in disability coverage too. “Look, even a fat person can be good at this thing!” Rather than just getting treated and respected as the athletes that they are. These are ways that we talk about athletes who are in bodies that aren’t thin, or are maybe outliers in terms of [the body norms of] their sport. They’re seen as exceptions, and they don’t get the same level of respect and attention. Virginia The Fridge’s real name is William Perry. I had to google it, just so we don’t only refer to him by a harmful nickname. And he was a defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears back in the 80s, and later played for the Philadelphia Eagles. William Perry. Photo by Stephen Dunn, Getty Images [ Post-recording note: William Perry did enjoy quite a bit of celebrity, and sponsorship deals, during his football career, though the media relentlessly reported on his weight and made fat jokes about him. But to Frankie’s point about size-related discrepancies in football contracts and other earning potential, Sports Illustrated reported in 2000 that Perry was working as a brick layer, and in 2016, reported on Perry’s financial debts, substance abuse struggles, and other health problems; at the time he was held in a Britney Spears-style conservatorship by his brother. CW on both links for significant fatphobia.] Share Frankie So I mentioned my book, right? For people that aren’t familiar with it, the National Women’s Football League existed in the 1970s and 1980s. The coverage, though, really could have been written today. It was often really shocking to me how little has changed. But one of the things they would do because, again, we’re talking about a sport like football, where there is a wide variety in the size of the bodies that are going to be on the field. And one of the teams had this woman, her name was Bobbie Grant. Her nickname was SuperSugar, and she was in a band. She was a frontperson, that was her stage name. Virginia That’s amazing. Frankie And she weighed over 300 pounds, and was a lineman. And I know how much she weighed because the newspapers wanted to tell us all the time. And then they would put the weight of the smaller women next to her. You and your listeners are probably familiar with the trope of the headless fattie, right? Those dehumanizing photographs where the media just photographs their body. So Bobbie Grant would often be photographed from behind, sitting on the bench, so you actually couldn’t see her face. Or she’d be in a side by side with the beautiful, thin quarterback. And Bobbie was a Black woman, too. So a lot of these things came into play, right? But this is how the media was talking about her. Instead of being like, “This woman is an incredible lineman and is giving her team an advantage because they have Bobbie Grant and no one else does.” And so we can see that narrative, too. Leave a comment Virginia It’s fascinating, and it’s really, I think, deflating. I think about this from the perspective of parents putting kids in sports. And I think often, if you have a kid in a bigger body, you’re hoping they’re going to find a safe place in one of these sports where a larger body is an asset . So to understand that actually, they’re still going to encounter this, and it’s going to play out slightly differently than if your kid in a bigger body was trying to be a ballerina, but it’s still going to come up—that’s really frustrating. Frankie Yeah, and even sports that have weight classes, that have heavyweight classes, whether it’s wrestling or boxing, they still have weight limits that they often have to adhere to. And so still, there’s a lot of that really harmful dieting or the equivalent of exercise bulimia type behavior that happens around those sports even though there are weight classes. Virginia I’ll link back to an episode we did last year, which was an excerpt from Fat Talk , my chapter on sports, where we get into a lot of how the weight classes and the pressure to have the quote right body for the sport impacts kids. And it includes some strategies for how to talk to your kids about this. For anyone listening to this and feeling sort of panicked, but it is. It’s a really, really difficult thing to navigate. Is there anything else you want to add, about how this anti-fatness intersects with the anti-trans stuff, around how we police athletes, bodies, and especially in women’s sports? Frankie You and your listeners know that fatphobia in sports is coming from the fact that we live in a fatphobic society. But that fatphobia often intersects with, and is rooted in, transphobia and anti-Blackness, right? The beauty standards that idealize thinness are based on white supremacy. And those same beauty standards are going to negatively impact trans athletes, Black athletes, and other marginalized athletes. And we’ve talked about Ilona Maher and the way she is feminine, a particular way that doesn’t fully protect her from some of these questions, but insulates her a little bit. Ilona Maher. Kevin Mazur, Getty Images. For athletes who are both fat and trans, they’re going to have these intersecting challenges, right? If they’re good at their sport, suddenly it’s because they have an unfair advantage because they’re trans, right? I interviewed a transfeminine power lifter. Her name is Jaycee Cooper. She’s actually suing the state of Minnesota currently because she was banned from women’s powerlifting. But she talked about how, when she has a good competition, or does well, it’s not because she’s a good power lifter, it’s because she has an unfair advantage, because she’s trans. And if she has a doesn’t do well, and her transness isn’t a factor, she is often subjected to comments that might be rooted in weight stigma. Virginia So it’s coming from both directions. Well, it’s really from the same direction. But they’re going to hit both boxes if they can. Share Is there giving you hope right now, any any slivers of progress that you’re seeing? Because as you’ve said, there is so much potential for sports to be truly inclusive. But how do we get there, Frankie? Frankie There is so much potential, right? Like we’ve named so many different ways a larger body can be an asset in certain sports. And this can allow people and women in particular, whose bodies are hyper-visible and hyper-policed in other aspects of their lives, to find pride in what their body can do, to find belonging and contribute to a team. When I was reporting my book, I saw this happen over and over again. Women who played football thought about their bodies differently after being on the football field. They took that into other areas of their life. They could walk with their chin held high because they knew that whatever society thought about their body, they knew differently. They felt good about themselves. So I think that there’s so much potential there. I think a lot about the conversations happening in sports like gymnastics, post the Karolyis (longtime coaches of the U.S. national team, known for their abusive practices). There are still these very specific body standards, but they are shifting. You’re having people say things like, “It turns out having muscle and eating food for energy actually makes you a better athlete.” Virginia Who would have thought. Frankie I hate that that is progress, but it is. Virginia That’s where we are. That is progress. Frankie So I hope this continues. I think on a purely recreational level, there are clubs and things that exist, whether it’s just spaces that are going to be inclusive or that are designed specifically for people in fat bodies to participate in a sport or an athletic endeavor without being stigmatized or feeling nervous about having to do that. Those are things that exist. Subscribe now I think, as we navigate this progress and figure out how we can not just be inclusive, but actively fat positive, I think we really need to be aware of not falling into Good Fatty tropes . Like, you might be fat, but it’s okay because you’re good at sport. We’re assigning this moralism to that. So I think that’s the line that we have to walk when we have these conversations, too. Virginia No one has a moral obligation to perform athleticism just because they’re in a bigger body. It’s more about getting doors open so people who have wanted to do that, who haven’t been able to, are in the room now. Frankie Right, and the idea that your size doesn’t preclude you from being athletic, but also it’s okay if you’re not athletic, you can do a sport and be terrible at it and find joy in it and that’s pretty, pretty great. Virginia That’s so important. Leave a comment Butter Frankie So I have been watching season 3 of The Traitors , which just started. Are you familiar with The Traitors ? Virginia I know nothing. Frankie So it’s a competition reality show where a bunch of reality stars from other networks live in a castle and it’s hosted by Alan Cumming, in high camp, and very Scottish. There are always a lot of queer people, which I really, really love. And I’m a huge nerd about MTV’s The Challenge for anyone that remembers The Real World and Road Rules . The Challenge , I’m going to credit with inventing competition reality television. But it also has like what you see in Housewives franchises, where there are storylines from season to season, because the same people keep coming back. Virginia That’s satisfying. Frankie So it’s a combination of the two main kinds of reality shows, but it pre-existed all of them. And there have been OG Challenge cast members. They’ve done like 20 seasons of the show. But I consider the people who do The Challenge regularly to be pro athletes in a way, because it’s a physical competition show. But they’re getting older, and their bodies can’t do that anymore, and some of them are transitioning to these other shows. So I watched Season Two, because my favorite Challenge crush, CT, who they called Castle Daddy , was on it. And no one had heard of The Challenge . Nobody knew who The Challenge players were. And they won that show. They won that season. And they gave interviews afterwards like, “We invented the genre, and we were going to show people that we invented the genre.” So there’s a Challenger again in the cast this season. And then there are always a ton of queer people. And I just love queer people being campy and kind of making a mess . So that is what I am enjoying and thinking way, way too much about, like, narrative and dynamics on reality TV. Virginia I mean, that sounds like the perfect place for your brain to be, especially this week. That’s deeply comforting and absorbing in exactly the right way. Frankie I can make anything sports, apparently. Reality TV is sports. Virginia It’s very impressive. I’ll do a TV Butter as well, which is my 11-year-old and I are watching Schitt’s Creek right now. It’s her first time watching it. I’m re-watching it, I mean, it’s not news to say that’s an amazing show, but it’s such an amazing show, and it’s really fun to watch with a middle schooler. She’s really perfecting her sarcasm, trying to banter back like David and Alexis. So it’s very good for honing those skills, which I think is important in sixth grade. And, you know, it’s obviously amazing queer rep. David and Patrick are our love story for the ages. Frankie It is a great show. And every time I watch it, there are so many jokes layered in it. Like, it gets better. Virginia It gets better. Frankie I also just very much feel like David is… My gender is very David Rose-coded. Virginia I see that. I fully support that. I mean, he’s amazing. My other rec about it is if you are parenting a sometimes angsty tween, quoting Moira Rose at her is a great way to cut through some of the nonsense.. And then we both laugh and we move on. It’s good stuff. Well, Frankie, thank you. This was such a delight. I appreciate everything you’re doing. Tell folks where we can find you and how we can support you. Frankie The easiest way to find me is my newsletter . And then I am TheFrankieDLC on Instagram and Blue Sky. I am, like many of us, slowly deleting many social media accounts. So I would definitely say the newsletter is the best place, because I also share the things I publish elsewhere there as well. Virginia Fantastic. Thank you for being here! Subscribe now The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram ) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus , and Big Undies . The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe . Our theme music is by Farideh . Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism! Share…
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay , and it’s time for your January Indulgence Gospel. It’s time for another mailbag episode, so we’ll be answering questions like: ⭐️ Is it anti-fatness to care that your partner eats faster than you? ⭐️ What ultra processed foods can we not live without? ⭐️ What should you do when your friend starts weight loss drugs for “wardrobe” reasons? ⭐️ Did Virginia buy the air fryer and if so, what is she air frying? To hear our answers, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber . Subscriptions are $7 per month or $70 for the year. Westend61 for Getty Images Read more…
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay , and today we’re getting into our Ins and Outs for 2025. Most Indulgence Gospel episodes are paywalled, but we’re releasing today’s conversation for free as a January-has-been-a-lot-aleady treat! If you enjoy this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription . Subscribe now 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! Ekaterina Demidova, Getty Images Episode 176 Transcript Virginia Okay, Corinne, since you introduced me to this concept, can you explain for the people what an in and out list is? Corinne This came onto my radar maybe two years ago. Everyone on Instagram was posting a screenshot of their Notes app, with a list on the left of things that are IN for the coming year. And on the right, a list of things that are OUT. I think it’s kind of a fun exercise to do. You could really do it at any time of the year, but, you know, it’s New Year’s. We’re reflecting. Virginia Why not? Corinne It’s kind of like a resolution, but it’s a different framing. Because it’s this is what’s in for me this year. And this is what I’m leaving behind. I also think a lot of the lists that I’ve liked and appreciated are a little cheeky. Like something that’s out will be something you’ve been seeing everywhere. Virginia And you’re over it. On the diet culture front: You could certainly be like, “carbs are out,” and it would be very obviously diet culture. But it feels like there’s a little more room to breathe and make In/Out Lists not diet culture. Because it’s not even necessarily you resolving to do the things on your list. It could just be something you’re enjoying or bringing in. I like the flexibility of that a lot. Corinne That was one thing I wanted to bring up, because we talked about it last year. I intentionally have not looked back at my list from last year. I hate looking back at my old lists , because when I look at them, I literally feel like, who was that person? If I look back at old pictures of myself, I feel sort of tender for that younger version of myself. But when I look back at the in and out list, I’m like, who was that idiot? Virginia I think because they are cheeky and responding to trends? It’s kind of capturing a moment in time. Like, whatever is on your out list isa time capsule of the year before, which is fun, but it’s not necessarily going to be your truest core self. These are whims, these are our hot takes or unpopular opinions on things in this moment. It’s fine. I don’t think we have to look back at it. I don’t think we have to hold ourselves to these things lasting all year long. It’s just where we are in this particular moment. Corinne Definitely. It’s also something that I enjoy as a social activity. I like to ask my friends, what’s in and what’s out for you? Virginia Did I end up making one last year? I can’t even remember. Corinne I think you did, but I think it was a little late. I didn’t look back for yours because I didn’t want to look back for mine. Virginia Right, right? We’ll just let that go into the ether. [ Post-recording note: Or you can find Virginia’s 2024 list here , if you’re curious!] Corinne Another thing I’ve seen people doing around New Years is the bingo card, instead of an in and out list. Virginia Oh yeah, someone dropped this in chat this week. What is a bingo card? I don’t understand. Corinne The concept is basically that you make a bingo board. So what is that? Five by five squares? And each square has a thing in. It can be activities you want to do, or it can be outlandish predictions like, “Drake will be the Super Bowl performer.” Or a combination of both. And then you try to get bingo, and reward yourself. And this year, I was sort of feeling like, ooh, that feels a little more fun. Because I have some things that I wanted to put on my in/out list that don’t really fit. Like, getting a tattoo, or visiting my sister—you know, stuff like that is a little more concrete and bingo card-ish. Virginia Okay, well you decided it was an in and out episode, though. So that’s what I’ve come prepared to discuss. Corinne I’ve still come prepared to discuss in and outs! I just wanted to present the bingo card as a concept. Virginia We’re noting that we are aware of it in the zeitgeist—at least Corinne is. And I am now aware of it, so I appreciate that. Corinne Yeah, and if ins/outs feels bad to you, then you could do bingo. Or you could do nothing. Virginia This may just be where my brain is on this particular day, but the whole making a grid of five squares is like sounding hard and sort of like math homework. And I’m like, no, no, don’t make me do it. But I might feel differently another day. Corinne I would lose it. Like, where would I keep it? Because I don’t know how to do that in my notes app. Virginia I mean, I had to text you and be like, “How do we make a table in the notes app?” So this is where I’m starting. Leave a comment Alright, Corinne, kick us off. Give us your first. Corinne Well, as you might expect, I have a lot of ins and outs that are somewhat clothes related. So, IN for me is wearing one thing over and over again . OUT is buying multiples of the exact same thing. That’s something I’m really trying to let go of this year. Virginia As I’m wearing a sweater right now, which I own in four colors, I really respect that. Because you don’t ever like the thing in the multiple colors the same way. It’s very rare. Corinne I feel like we’ve talked about how this often doesn’t work. So I’m going to try and be aware of that. And I will say, I’ve already been tempted. As I was writing about the stuff I wore on my road trip , I was like, dang, I should really just buy another pair of those Universal Standard cargo jeans because I like them so much. Big Undies What I Wore on a Road Trip This Christmas was a particularly exciting one for me because I have a new nephew! And it was my first time getting to meet him, plus my first trip to Oregon, where my sister lives. The drive from New Mexico is about 19 hours, which I did over the course of 3 days / 2 nights (one short day and two longer… Read more a month ago · 56 likes · 23 comments · Corinne Fay Virginia You do. Corinne But I’m trying not to. Virginia So you’re referring to not buying multiples of the same exact item. Like, not just “Oh, I’m going to get the sweater in three colors.” But like, you would be tempted to buy two of the same sweater in the same color, if you liked it. Corinne Yes. I have this striped shirt from Target that I like, and I have two green ones and one blue one. Granted, I think they cost $10, but do I really need two of the exact same green striped shirt? Because I also have other striped shirts, you know? And then I’m trying to use this app Indyx to keep track of my closet. And I’m like, how do I even put in two of the exact same green shirt? Virginia Yeah, that’s confusing. I mean, I love a uniform, so I admit I fall for the multiples concept. I have my Beyond Yoga joggers in three colors, and I just rotate through them all week long in the winter. But I have definitely been burnt by this rule as well. So I agree it could be out, or at least heavy reflection before committing to something in multiples. Corinne Yeah, I think it’s also way easier to buy the multiples of a thing that’s really cheap. I’m doing this at Target and Old Navy, you know? And then that doesn’t feel good. Virginia Yeah, The Beyond Yoga joggers are an investment. I bought one pair and was wearing them constantly and then built up the collection when they go on sale. It’s a little different. Share Corinne What’s on your list? Virginia Okay, I’ll do a clothing one, too. IN for me is bootcut pants. And I feel like this is going to be controversial, but OUT for me is the wide-cropped Colette pants that everybody loves and that I loved like three months ago, but I don’t love anymore. Now, I am open to that changing in the summer. I really feel like for me, a wide legged crop pant is a warm weather style. I need to treat them like shorts. I cannot crack the boot styling with them. The boot and sock styling, I cannot crack it. I just feel like a crazy art teacher, and not in an aesthetic choice way. Just in a what happened way, when I get dressed in it. But I have been wearing some boot cut pants , also from Beyond Yoga. And I’m like, why did we banish this trend for so long? They’re kind of cute and comfy. I don’t know, I like them. Corinne That’s exciting. And so bootcut—they’re touching your shoes? Virginia They are, yes. They touch my shoes. They are fitted through the thigh, and then there’s a slight flare, but not all the way to full flare. And they look cute with running shoes. And they also look good with a boot—like a chunky boot or probably any boot. I mean, these are leggings materials, so I don’t wear them with a dressy boot. That feels odd to me. But a casual boot. But I am now like, do I want some nice black pants that are a bootcut? Corinne Or jeans? Virginia I haven’t tried bootcut jeans—I mean, in this millennia, obviously. I wore them plenty in the 90s, but I am like, oh, a high waisted bootcut jean is interesting to me . So TBD on that. But that’s where I am on pants right now, which is a new place. Subscribe now Corinne That’s cool. Are you going to get rid of the Colette ones? Or seeing what happens? Virginia I’m going to hold on to them for the warmer weather. I have them in denim. And I thought they were going to go through the fall/winter, and they are not. But I’m going to put them over in my shorts pile and treat them like a summer clothing item. I think that’s what they are for me. At least bare ankles weather, which, we’re recording this in 12 degrees in New York right now. So it is not bare ankles weather. So that may be heavily influencing my pants feelings at the moment. What’s next for you? Corinne Okay, my next one is kind of a response to some events, so I’ll just say that. Okay, IN: Bird watching. OUT: TikTok. IN (Arthur Morris, Getty Images) Virginia Amazing. Corinne Just for the record, Tiktok will not be out if it doesn’t get banned. Virginia But you are making your peace with that possibility. Corinne If it does get banned, I’m replacing it with bird watching. Virginia Well, my next one is very related. We’re really in sync here. IN for me is Bird Buddy , which is my new video bird feeder. And OUT for me is Instagram. So I now am like, oh, do I need to get you a Bird Buddy? Because let me explain to you what is so great about this. It’s a little bird feeder with a video camera in it, and it connects to an app on your phone. So not only do they send you photos when birds land on the feeder, so you get an exciting notification every now and then, it also has a livestream! So instead of scrolling Instagram, I can livestream my bird feeders and it is the most soothing thing ever, Corinne. I’m just like, oh, nothing’s happening. Oh, here’s a chickadee. Okay, nothing’s happening now. Oh, here’s a nuthatch. Corinne IN: bird media. OUT: social media. DEFINITELY IN. (Ignore amateur Photoshopping out of Virginia’s house in background and enjoy the MARVEL that is this red-bellied woodpecker!!! ) Virginia As people who read the newsletter know, I took a three week Instagram break over Christmas, and I was like, oh, I think my brain is so much happier. So now I’m trying a thing where, since I have to go on Instagram for work to post about the newsletter or whatever, I download the app, post, answer a few DMS, delete the app. And this is what I’m trying this week. We’ll see. I am really interested in less Instagram time for me. Tiktok is not my challenge. I never got hooked into it. But I think birds are the thing to replace this stuff with. I think we’re really onto something! And I’m just saying, a bird app really helps. Corinne Yeah, that does sound cool. The Merlin bird app has been a Butter for me before, and I got a pair of binoculars for Christmas. Virginia Ooh, delightful. Corinne Going to try to be using the binoculars. Virginia Yeah, yeah. Are you going out bird watching in places or backyard bird watching? Corinne You know, I haven’t gone yet . But that’s on my goals. That would be on my bingo card. Virginia To go on a bird watch. Corinne To go bird watching. I also weirdly have a lot of friends here who are really into bird watching, so I’m hoping one of them will take me under their wing. Virginia I noticed the bird humor there. We’re going to go past that, but that did happen. But if they don’t take you under their wing, come to New York and my mother will take you bird watching. Bird watching is, I would say, conservatively, 70 percent of my mother’s personality. It is her deep passion, her retirement hobby, calling, what have you. She does it all the time. So she’s also on the live stream. Oh! I can add you to my Bird Buddy! Corinne Oh yeah! Because I think my dog will chase the birds away if I get a feeder for my yard. Leave a comment Virginia Okay, I will add you when we are done recording so you can check out the live stream whenever you want and get the notifications. Also, to be clear, it’s actually not my Bird Buddy. I gave it to my 11 year old for Christmas, and she does also really love it. And there’s a thing where you can name the frequent visitor birds. She’s naming them. So I got it for her, because she’s always loved birds, and now I’m totally hooked. Well. That was like 90 minutes on birds, but that feels right. Share Give us another one. Corinne Okay, my next one is: IN for me, decluttering. OUT for me, organizing. Virginia Okay, say more, because how are they not the same thing? Corinne Well, I feel like I had this revelation last year ( thanks to this post ) where I was, like, before I can do any organizing, I actually just need to get rid of some stuff. Like, it’s like, it’s just never going to stay organized if— Virginia If there’s too much? Corinne I need to just have less stuff. I’m not ever going to be a minimalist. But before I’m organizing, I need to be letting some stuff go. Virginia So organizing is out for you, but maybe not out forever? Corinne It’s not that being organized is out. It’s organizing is not a solution to having too much stuff, I guess. Virginia Yeah, it’s like, maybe you’ll revisit that concept if you do pare down the stuff to the point where some system of organization can contain it. But currently that is not an option. Corinne Right. And it’s like that thing where you buy the containers for your pantry, rather than first you need to get rid of all the stuff that’s expired. Virginia Totally, totally, yes. Corinne That’s a conceptual one, you know? Virginia It is high concept, but I’m here for it. Subscribe now This is maybe also going to be a little controversial. IN for me is baking cookies in my air fryer. OUT for me—but trust me, controversial, at least locally in my house—are Tate’s cookies. Corinne Oh, wow. I’m obsessed with Tate’s cookies. Virginia So is my seven year old. We go through conservatively two bags a week, and I think I get to eat one of them. One cookie, to be clear. Corinne They have the crunch level of potato chips. It’s so easy to eat a whole bag. Virginia They’re delicious. They are absolutely delicious. I’m not saying they’re not delicious. I am saying they are like $7 a bag. Meanwhile, I’ve been buying the tub of the Nestle Toll House cookie dough from the grocery store—you can get a giant tub for like $7 so it’s going to make way more cookies. And my air fryer has a cookie setting! So you can bake 12 cookies in the air fryer so much faster than you can bake them in the oven. And if you make sure the dough is warm enough before you put them in, they get spread out and thin, very similar to the Tate’s cookies. IN. You all know me. I love an ultra processed food. I’m not here to say from scratch is better. I can also bake cookies fully from scratch. I’m not doing that here. I’m using the store bought dough. But the delightfulness of being able to have warm cookies, because also this way the cookies are warm! Which is the best. The Tate’s ones are not warm. And when it’s a movie night or something, just like, I’m going to bake 12 cookies really fast so we can eat them while we watch the movie. Corinne That’s awesome. It sounds great. I mean, if I had to choose between Tate’s and fresh baked cookies, I would choose fresh baked. Virginia I think we all would. But I would previously not have gone to the effort until I discovered the store bought dough and how much faster they are to bake in my air fryer. But I will tell you, it’s not popular. The other day, we had both options available, and the seven year old went for the Tate’s. She was like, “I don’t like those homemade cookies.” And I was like, “They aren’t even fully homemade!” So I don’t know that I’m going to be able to actually decrease my Tate’s budget. I may have to do some subtle transitioning over? But for me personally, I think they’re tastier, so. Corinne That’s a good one. Leave a comment Okay, I’m going to do a food one too, then. It’s also maybe a little silly. IN for me is beef stews or stewed beef type of things. OUT is pulled pork. IN (rudisill, Getty Images) Virginia Whoa. Corinne I’ve got to be honest, I have not been eating a lot of pulled pork. But we made a pot roast when I was at my sister’s house, which is something I’ve never made before, and is not something that my mom served growing up. It was delicious. And now I’m aspiring to eat more pot roast. And I’ve a couple times made the Alison Roman chili recipe , which has beef chuck in it instead of ground beef. Virginia Oh, that is a good way to make chili. Corinne And I think I’m going to try a brisket soon. So I’m into huge chunks of beef as opposed to huge chunks of pork. Virginia Okay, but I don’t know why we’re being anti the huge chunk of pork. Share Corinne It’s arbitrary. Maybe I could think of a better out for that if I worked on it. But I feel like pulled pork has been in for a long time. Virginia It’s true. I actually also have a meat-related one. Why are we so in sync? Our brains are on a mind meld. So mine, I will disclaim before I even say it—lots of privilege involved here! Privilege to be able to make a more expensive grocery choice not available to everyone. I think it’s clear with all of these, we’re not endorsing these as lifestyle plans for the rest of you. Corinne These are highly personal. Virginia So mine is IN small butcher meat and eggs, OUT grocery store meat and eggs. The backstory: I have two children who are vegetarian or vegetarian-leaning. I am not interested in being a vegetarian, I’m sorry. But in a attempt to be be more aware of the many issues around meat consumption, I have decided that this year, I’m going to commit to only buying meat from our local butcher who specializes in animals raised on small farms. These were the happiest of cows, given every opportunity, a good college education, etc. So I’m only going to buy our meat and our eggs from them, and I’m not going to buy the grocery store stuff. It is more expensive, but it’s a great local business in our community. They add a lot of value. I would love to help make sure they stay here. So that is a shift I’m making. I value farmers and what they do, and I want to be being more mindful of that, since it is something I can do, Corinne That’s cool. That’s a good one! Subscribe now Um, okay, I have one other food one that’s a little silly. IN as a pastry / dessert flavor in for me, passion fruit. OUT as a pastry, dessert flavor, matcha. Virginia Was matcha ever in? Corinne I feel like yes. Virginia Did anyone really like it? Or is it like how everyone says they read the books on the Booker list awards, but they don’t really read them? Corinne Oh, I don’t know. I like matcha as a drink. I don’t want a matcha eclair. But I would like a passionfruit eclair. Virginia I just want chocolate. Corinne All of this is irrelevant to you, nevermind. Virginia It’s very opaque to me, but I’m glad for you. The next one is another little bit more high concept. It’s about colors I’m feeling right now for myself and for for my house and for my wardrobe. IN is dark teal, dark green, like evergreen forest green, and pink. OUT for me, is light gray. I should say, pink is always in for me, but different shades of pink. I’m leaning a little more hot pink these days, a little over the millennial blush pink. But all the pinks. Corinne Oooh, that’s a good one, yes. Leave a comment Virginia And I was explaining to you the other day, I have realized light gray clothing makes me look dead. It makes me look like a corpse. And yet I own so much of it. It’s a color that is heavily marketed to Millennial Moms. Because it’s very minimalist. You should have the fisherman sweater in this color. And I don’t know, I just feel like I’m always being told to wear light gray and I’m done. I’m not doing it anymore. So it feels good. Corinne I love that. I feel like those colors look good together, too. Virginia Yeah, it’s also kind of my book cover again , and I don’t really know how I feel about that, but I’m expecting it to evolve. I’m saying these are colors I’m feeling right now, but I am in the process of trying to choose a new living room sofa, and I feel like I’ve always gone for blues. Well, in my heart, I want a cream sofa, but I know my life. But in the past, I would have always gone towards more blue, gray colors. And I’m now feeling like a forest green or a deep teal or something. Corinne I’m really into forest green as well. Virginia But does that mean we’ll be sick of it soon and I shouldn’t put it in a sofa where I’m not going to want to replace it for a long time? Corinne I think it’s a classic. Virginia I think it’s like navy, where you can build around it. You can change the pop of colors around it. Okay, I’m glad we had that talk. Corinne Okay. This one is a little more clothes-related and this is something I really need to work on. IN for me, accessories. OUT for me, matching sets. Virginia Oh! Corinne I thought you might feel targeted by that. Virginia I feel a little called out, I only just got into matching sets like six months ago, and now you’re taking them from—well, not from me, from you. Corinne I had a realization. I bought a few matching sets last summer and then ended up only wearing the shorts . And I was just like, hmm, do I really like matching sets, or do I just like the concept? Virginia I love the concept, but I understand. Share Corinne And I’m feeling I really want to beef up on my accessories collection. Virginia I support this. Are you a “I want a set of accessories I wear all the time” person or do you want to mix and match different outfits have different accessories? Corinne I want to mix and match. I wear very basic stuff so I feel like some accessories could make it feel more fun and fancy. I feel like I’m seeing a lot of brooches? Pins could be interesting. Plus the whole bonnet/hood/balaclava thing. Virginia You’ve been wanting a bonnet forever. If this is not the year you get it, I don’t even know. Corinne I mean, I just feel like the bonnet season in Albuquerque is so short that I can’t really justify having a lot of them. Virginia Where is the bonnet season ever long? What climate does one wear a bonnet for? Corinne Well, I feel like, in New York, you could probably wear them through March. I feel like here it’s probably just December and January. Virginia Are you talking about like a wool bonnet for warmth? Corinne Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, like a knit one. Virginia Because you’ve also been interested in fabric bonnets, like cotton. Corinne Yeah, that’s true. Okay, well, yeah, that might be a little bit of a longer season. Virginia You could wear that whenever you’re feeling like a little Puritan cosplay. Okay, well, I still endorse you getting a bonnet anyway, because I think your heart has wanted one for a long time. And I agree it will be a jaunty accessory. Corinne Yes, thank you. Also, jewelry. You know, jewelry has been in for a while now. Shoes. Virginia Okay, my last one is also going back to clothing. And it’s really more about my out than my in, because my in has been in for me for a while, but my IN is two piece bathing suits. They are easier when you are dealing with children and you’re gonna have to go to the bathroom. I know you can do the pull to the side move in a one piece, but I don’t like it. It is easier to wear a two piece and only body hangups keep us from that ease. IN (FG Trade, Getty Images) So I’m pro two piece bathing suits for myself, specifically, and also the world, if that is interesting to you. And what is OUT for me is the one piece with what my friend Mary calls apology ruching. My friend Mary went to Great Wolf Lodge, which is a local indoor water park situation. I’ve never been, but I hear tales. And she was like, “Virginia, we’re at this water park over winter break with the kids. It’s like all families and their kids. And every mom in her 40s or late 30s was wearing the one piece with ruching.” Which is like, what is it meant to hide? Because it hides nothing! It does nothing. It’s your body, but now it has some bumpy fabric on top. It’s a way of signaling that you’ve tried to cover yourself. “I tried to prevent you understanding that I have a belly.” Subscribe now Corinne I mean, ruching is for sure out. But also, the thing I’ll say about that is, it’s very hard to find a one piece bathing suit without ruching! My top bathing suit is a one piece from Land’s End, and I would so strongly prefer that it did not have ruching, but that’s not an option. Virginia No, I understand. It’s one of those obnoxious things, especially about plus size swimwear. Ruching is the plus size swimwear equivalent of the cold shoulder top. It’s like, no one asked for this, but they put it on everything. But that’s why I’m going over to two pieces. And my hack for two pieces, especially for if you are busty like I am, and you need a family friendly swimsuit, is sports bra. Cute, colored sports bra, fun pattern on the bottom, high waisted bottoms, is my formula. And I just feel like it gives you more versatility, frankly, as a family friendly swimsuit. People can handle seeing three inches of your midsection and you’re not doing this apology ruching game. Corinne A lot of high waisted two piece bottoms also have ruching. Virginia They do. And I will not be purchasing them. Corinne Hopefully we have some swimsuit designers listening. Virginia Yeah, get on this, people. No one wants it. No one asked for it. Especially with moms who are concerned about, quote, mom, body things. It’s like, this way of being like, “Maybe I used to be confident displaying my body at a communal swimming place, but I no longer am, so I have ruched my midsection.” No more! Well, this was very fun. I loved all of these. I’m very excited about our ins and outs, and I want to hear what other people are doing. Corinne Yeah, me too. I really want to see what some other people have on their lists. Virginia And you don’t have to do the notes format if you don’t want, obviously. We’ll have ours in the transcript. You can just put them in the comments. Leave a comment Corinne’s In/Out list Virginia’s In/Out List Leave a comment Butter selfiefay A post shared by @selfiefay Corinne Okay, my butter is the shirt that I’m wearing right now. It is called the Fay Chore Coat . Virginia It’s named after you! Corinne It is named after me. It comes from a brand called Connally goods, which is a small clothing company in Canada. They’re really cool. They have good sizing options, and I think they’re one of those brands that if you’re not on the size chart, they will work with you to make something anyways. Virginia Amazing. Corinne But anyways, because I have talked a lot about loving denim shirts and denim chore coats, they made this coat. It has snaps in the front. Virginia It’s adorable. Corinne It’s really cute. And I’ve been wearing it as a shirt. I think you could also wear it as a coat. The denim is not too thick. It’s pretty thin, but it’s really cute. And everyone should check it out. Virginia Also, can we just have a moment for like, you’re such a celebrity that someone named a coat after you? That’s pretty amazing. That’s a level of fame, few of us reach that peak is what I’m saying. Corinne I mean, I think it’s very niche. But, yes, I’m very famous within a very tiny niche. Virginia They’re fans. We love that. If you’re not reading Big Undies, this is your reminder yet again to please fix that. I t’s so good people are naming clothing after Corinne! So that’s why you should be reading it. Also, if you’re a paid Burnt Toast subscriber, you get 20% off. The chore coat is adorable, and I feel like very versatile. Like you could wear it like open over striped shirt. You could do a lot with that. And it is quintessential you, they really nailed your style. It’s awesome. I’m excited to shop there. That’s very cool. Corinne What’s your Butter? Virginia Okay, my Butter is what Corinne got me for Christmas, which is these amazing brownies from Vesta Chocolate . Corinne sent me—I don’t even know how many you sent, there were many. It was a very full box of these amazing brownies. And they are like the richest, most super chocolatey brownies. And we all know I am someone with some authority on this subject. I am something of a brownie expert, and they are the most rich, super chocolatey brownies I’ve ever had. Corinne And I just want to say that I heard about these from Helen Rosner! Virginia Oh, well there you go. There you go! These are New Yorker food critic endorsed brownies. [Come see Virginia and Helen discuss these brownies and other things IRL next Thursday, January 23! Tickets here. ] They’re so rich. Like, again, I am something of a brownie overachiever. I actually couldn’t eat a whole one, so I ended up cutting them into quarters. So you maybe sent a dozen brownies, and we ended up with like four dozen. Corinne Oh my God, that’s amazing. Virginia They were like the Jesus of brownies, they just kept making more loaves and fishes or whatever. It was great. When I was hosting a lot over the holidays, I could just have them out on the counter, just having a super decadent, delicious treat like that around all the time. Also a plug for food gifting in general, you really cannot go wrong. My food gift this year was I gave quite a few of this coffee cake that was recommended by from a bakery called Zingerman’s. And I did gift one to myself as well, and was really glad I did that. Corinne I’ve given people stuff from Zingerman’s before. It’s really good. Virginia Yeah, their stuff is great, and it lasts a long time, too. So that’s awesome. So, general Butter of food gifting. But specifically, these brownies were off the charts, and I’m excited to see what else they ship. All right, well, so much good stuff is in for 2025. It’s been like a little rocky start to January over here in the Sole-Smith household. We’ve got some flu, we’ve got some things going on, and this is picking up my mood quite a bit. So thank you! Share The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram ) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus , and Big Undies — subscribe for 20% off ! The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe . Our theme music is by Farideh . Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism! Subscribe now…
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