Podcasts about fat talk parenting

Just a few years ago, ‘body positivity' was everywhere. Then came Ozempic. Audie talks with Virginia Sole-Smith, who spent the past decade writing about ‘diet culture.' She weighs in on the future of the body positivity in an Ozempic world, and whether the movement and the revolutionary new class of weight loss drugs can coexist.  Virginia Sole Smith's book is called “Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Journalist Virginia Sole-Smith joins us to discuss how GLP-1 hype has changed the conversation about diet culture, the importance of body autonomy, how “bro” diet culture became public policy, how she handles haters, the “fed is best” approach to parenting, and lots more. Behind the paywall, she shares her experience of weighing herself for the first time in years, what it's been like to date for the first time in a larger body, how she's changed her relationship to cardio, and more. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. As a journalist, Virginia Sole-Smith has reported from kitchen tables, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid's tail. Virginia's latest book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, is a New York Times bestseller that investigates how the "war on childhood obesity" has caused kids to absorb a daily onslaught of body shame from peers, school, diet culture, and families—and offers research-based strategies to help parents name and navigate the anti-fat bias that infiltrates our schools, doctor's offices and dinner tables. Virginia began her career in women's magazines, alternatively challenging beauty standards and gender norms, and upholding diet culture through her health, nutrition and fitness reporting. This work led to her first book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America, in which Virginia explored how we can reconnect to our bodies in a culture that's constantly giving us so many mixed messages about both those things. Virginia's work appears in the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and many other publications. She writes the newsletter Burnt Toast, where she explores anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health, and also hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. Virginia lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her two kids, two cats, a dog, and way too many houseplants.  Check out Christy's three books, Anti-Diet, The Wellness Trap, and The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook for a deeper dive into the topics covered on the pod. If you're ready to break free from diet culture and make peace with food, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course. For more critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, check out Christy's Rethinking Wellness podcast! You can also sign up to get it in your inbox every week at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Ask a question about diet and wellness culture, disordered-eating recovery, and the anti-diet approach for a chance to have it answered on Rethinking Wellness. You can also subscribe to the Food Psych Weekly newsletter to check out previous answers!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comJournalist Virginia Sole-Smith joins us to discuss how GLP-1 hype has changed the conversation about diet culture, the importance of body autonomy, how “bro” diet culture became public policy, how she handles haters, the “fed is best” approach to parenting, and lots more. Behind the paywall, she shares her experience of weighing herself for the first time in years, what it's been like to date for the first time in a larger body, how she's changed her relationship to cardio, and more. Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com. As a journalist, Virginia Sole-Smith has reported from kitchen tables, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid's tail. Virginia's latest book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, is a New York Times bestseller that investigates how the "war on childhood obesity" has caused kids to absorb a daily onslaught of body shame from peers, school, diet culture, and families—and offers research-based strategies to help parents name and navigate the anti-fat bias that infiltrates our schools, doctor's offices and dinner tables. Virginia began her career in women's magazines, alternatively challenging beauty standards and gender norms, and upholding diet culture through her health, nutrition and fitness reporting. This work led to her first book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America, in which Virginia explored how we can reconnect to our bodies in a culture that's constantly giving us so many mixed messages about both those things. Virginia's work appears in the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and many other publications. She writes the newsletter Burnt Toast, where she explores anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health, and also hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. Virginia lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her two kids, two cats, a dog, and way too many houseplants. If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it! Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This episode originally aired on July 30, 2024. In this throwback episode, Ricki speaks with writer Virginia Sole-Smith. Virginia was a skinny teenager who became a fat adult. She now writes about anti-fat bias, from finding clothes to accessing medical care. On this episode, hear Ricki open up about her own weight journey as she and Virginia talk about how weight discrimination shows up across the fat spectrum, how to let your kids make their own decisions about what they put in their bodies, and whether or not Ricki herself has contributed to fatphobia. Get ready for one of the most open and honest conversations about weight you’ve ever heard. Check out Virginia’s books, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. Subscribe to Virginia’s Substack newsletter, Burnt Toast. Follow Ricki Lake @rickilake on Instagram. And stay up to date with us @LemonadaMedia on X, Facebook, and Instagram. For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our show and get bonus content. Subscribe today at bit.ly/lemonadapremium. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone! I'm very glad you're here. I've been reading a book called “Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture” by Virginia Sole-Smith and even though I'm just a third of the way through it, it floors me every time I turn the page. The author is talking about the effects anti-fat bias can have on families and she shares some stories that break my heart. Imagine if your child was taken away from you because they're fat. Just simply because of their body size. This nightmare was real for some families and I want to talk about weight discrimination and how harmful it can be.    One of the cases talked about in the book was the case of Anamarie Regino, a girl who was removed from her parents at a young age because of her size. State authorities decided her weight was a form of child abuse or neglect so they took her away. Anamarie's parents fought back and argued that she had an undiagnosed medical condition that contributed to her size but it took months of court battle to return her to her family. I want to talk about how interventions like this and even well-intentioned health initiatives like Michelle Obama's “Let's Move” campaign, which heavily emphasized the “epidemic” of childhood obesity, contribute to stigma and harm. I explore the myth that a child's weight is the parent's fault, the messages that being fat is inherently dangerous that are sent by interventions like Anamarie's, and the impact all the discourse on weight and a specific mold of physical health has on children. So join me as I dive into why we need to speak out against anti-fat bias. __About Dr. Michelle Tubman:Dr. Michelle Tubman is certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which means she understands exactly what's happening in your body when you diet. Although she does not provide any medical advice in her coaching programs, this knowledge gives her an edge over most coaches.She also holds Level 1 and Level 2 Precision Nutrition coaching certifications which make her skilled at coaching nutrition, dietary change, and habit change in general. Realizing that emotional eating and bingeing are complicated for most of us, she also did training in mind-body and intuitive eating. Peace around food is possible.__Resources discussed in this episode:“Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture” by Virginia Sole-Smith__Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:Website: www.wayzahealth.comFollow me on Facebook and InstagramEmail Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com

Writer Virginia Sole-Smith was a skinny teenager who became a fat adult. She now writes about and personally experiences anti-fat bias on a daily basis, from finding clothes to accessing medical care. On this episode, hear Ricki open up about her own weight journey as she and Virginia talk about how weight discrimination shows up across the fat spectrum, how to let your kids make their own decisions about what they put in their bodies, and whether or not Ricki herself has contributed to fatphobia. Get ready for one of the most open and honest conversations about weight you've ever heard. Show Resources: Check out Virginia's books, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America Subscribe to Virginia's Substack newsletter, Burnt Toast Follow Ricki Lake @rickilake on Instagram. And stay up to date with us @LemonadaMedia on X, Facebook, and Instagram. For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our show and get bonus content. Subscribe today at bit.ly/lemonadapremium.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My conversations with Michaeleen Doucleff are so much fun that sometimes I forget to hit record!Usually it doesn't even matter what we talk about, but this time it's extra good. You know those times when your kid is acting like a little contrarian. You say up, they say down. You say yes, they say no. And around and around and around.Michaeleen has come up with an amazingly simple sentence that shifts this dynamic like magic.It will turn them not just into collaborators but actual co-creators.Listen as Michaeleen and I discuss oh so many things. I love my time with her so much and I think you will too!In this episode, you'll learn:How to encourage your child to contribute ideas and collaborate in planning activities.The messages about our values that we send when we choose recreation for our kids.Why things that keep kids engaged aren't always as fun as they might seem.And much more! As always, thanks for listening. Head over to Facebook, where you can join my free group Mastermind Parenting Community. We post tips and tools and do pop-up Live conversations where I do extra teaching and coaching to support you in helping your strong-willed children so that they can FEEL better and DO better. If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it!Get all the links, resources, and transcripts here: https://mastermindparenting.com/podcast-294About Randi RubensteinRandi Rubenstein helps parents with a strong-willed kiddo become a happier family and enjoy the simple things again like bike rides and beach vacays.She's the founder of Mastermind Parenting, host of the Mastermind Parenting podcast, and author of The Parent Gap. Randi works with parents across the U.S.At Mastermind Parenting, we believe every human deserves to have a family that gets along.Randi's Web and Social LinksWebsite: https://mastermindparenting.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mastermindparentingInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mastermind_parenting/About Michaleen Doucleff:Michaleen Doucleff is an award-winning global health correspondent and the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans. https://michaeleendoucleff.com/hunt-gather-parent/ Resources Discussed/LinksThe New York Times profile of Virginia Sole-Smith https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/well/eat/fat-activist-virginia-sole-smith.htmlHer book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture https://virginiasolesmith.com/books/fat-talk-parenting-in-the-age-of-diet-culture/All Joy, No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, by Jennifer Senior https://jennifersenior.net/all-joy-and-no-funOur 12-week Basics Bootcamp program is now available as a 100% online self-study course! https://mastermindparenting.com/minimasters/Live assessment:

Diet culture and anti-fatness are very present in our schools, from being designed into the curriculum to showing up in the teacher's lunchroom. Cait O-Connor (she/her) began her own fat liberation journey in her early 20s and quickly brought anti-diet principles into her classrooms. Cait shares how students have responded to her anti-fat lessons and how parents and teachers can support kids further. Cait O'Connor is a national award-winning middle school English teacher from New York, and the creator of #DitchingDietCultureAtSchool. She is passionate about mental health advocacy, peer work, and eating disorder recovery, and she has written for publications such as Edutopia, English Journal, Language Arts, and is featured in chapter 10 of Virginia Sole-Smith's book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. Mentioned in this episode: Ditching Diet Culture at School digital resource library, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, Harvard Implicit Association test (choose Weight IAT), What's Eating Us, The Fat Joke poem by Rachel Wiley. Please connect with Cait through Instagram and Twitter.This episode's poem is called “How to Triumph Like a Girl” by Ada Limon.Connect with Fat Joy on the website, Instagram, subscribe to the Fat Joy newsletter, and watch full video episodes on YouTube. Want to share some fattie love? Please rate this podcast and give it a joyful review. Our thanks to Chris Jones and AR Media for keeping this podcast looking and sounding joyful

Plus, provocative and practical ideas about actually enjoying exercise, the real relationship between weight and health, the problem with weight loss, the morality of food, feeding your kids, and who "the real bad guy" is.Virginia Sole-Smith is the bestselling author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. She also writes the Burnt Toast newsletter, hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast, and frequently contributes to The New York Times and other publications.In this episode we talk about:The actual connections between health and body sizeThe severe limitations of many of the most popular approaches to weight lossNuanced strategies for disentangling from diet cultureHow to exercise without a hidden agenda of trying to wrench your body into a specific shapeThe idea that food doesn't have a moral valueThe relationship between men, exercise, food, and diet cultureHow our kids are getting caught up in diet culture, and what parents can do about itWhat Virginia's smartest critic would say about her contentionsHer take on OzempicRelated Episodes:Dharma teacher Cara Lai on mindfulness and exerciseJud Brewer on “The Hunger Habit”Evelyn Tribole on “The Anti-Diet”Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/virginia-sole-smithSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Feeding kids is hard. It doesn't matter if you have a sushi-loving toddler or one who eats three beige foods. There is judgement and stigma about everything and it is easy for moms to feel like they are constantly failing. Today we talk to author, podcaster and substacker Virginia Sole-Smith (author of Fat Talk and substacker of Burnt Toast) about how kid food influencers on social media can make mothers feel shame and promote diet culture and anti-fat bias from an incredibly young age.BUY Virginia's book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture here.https://bookshop.org/p/books/fat-talk-parenting-in-the-age-of-diet-culture-virginia-sole-smith/18525159Subscribe to Virginia's newsletter and podcast Burnt Toast here.https://virginiasolesmith.substack.com/Buy The Sicilian Inheritance here.https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-sicilian-inheritance-jo-piazza/20266161

Mentioned in this Episode: The Minnesota Starvation Experimenthttps://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/10/hunger  What Mirror Meditation Can Teach Youhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv--OcsSKQ0  Compassion by Kristen Neffhttps://self-compassion.org/  Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culturehttps://www.amazon.com/Fat-Talk-Parenting-Diet-Culture-ebook/dp/B0B1Y5TKLP  Maintenance Phase Podcasthttps://www.maintenancephase.com/  Debra's Free Online Workshophttps://www.debrabenfield.com/free-online-workshop   For more on Deb Benfield, you can follow her on Instagram @agingbodyliberation, on Facebook: Debra Benfield RDN page and through her website https://www.debrabenfield.com/. For more on Argavan Nilforoush, be sure to follow her on Instagram @babystepsnutrition, on Facebook: Baby Steps Nutrition page, on YouTube: Baby Steps Nutrition Podcast, on Twitter @argavanRDN, on LinkedIn @ArgavanNilforoush and through her website www.babystepsnutrition.com.    

Tawny and Lisa talk about Ozempic, a diabetes medication that can have the side effect of weight loss. Word of that side effect caused a run on the drug that led to a supply shortage for people with diabetes. Normalizing off-label use of a prescription drug (as opposed to taking a weight-management drug while under a doctor's care) as a route to losing weight undermines the progress society has made on body positivity. It perpetuates stigma around body size and shape. And for Tawny and Lisa, even if they had a had a pill to remove their cravings, they still would have needed community, therapy and support for to be mentally healthy. Music Minute features Megan Trainor, Lizzo and Eminem Read What Ozempic Reveals About Desire  Check out Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture This episode is sponsored by the sober entrepreneurs at Sour Humanoid vinegar. Add a splash of these artisanal vinegars to your dinner to brighten up the flavor of your protein and veggies. Order a bottle today atsourhumanoid.com and follow them at @sourhumanoid.  Pre-Order Tawny's book, Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze Subscribe to Tawny's sober dating, sex, and relationships advice column, Beyond Liquid Courage. Purchase Lisa's memoir, Girl Walks Out of a Bar

Our guest this week is author and podcast host Virginia Sole-Smith. You may know Virginia from her newsletter Burnt Toast, which explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. Virginia is the author of the 2018 book The Eating Instinct. Her most recent book—Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture—which going to talk about a lot today encourages us to name and navigate our anti-fat bias so we can raise happier and healthier children.You can find Virginia at virginiasolesmith.comYou can find Kim on her Substack: kimfrance.substack.com. For exclusive Everything Is Fine episodes — along with weekly style and culture recommendations — join our Patreon: patreon.com/everythingisfine Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Do I look fat in this?” This is the phrase that parents fear more than most any other. And yet, how many parents raised in the diet crazed 1980s and ‘90s have never said this themselves. As a nation, we are pathologically afraid of fat. And this, argues Virginia Sole-Smith is making us, not thinner or healthier, but fatter and sicker. Jane and Liz go deep with Virginia on her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, about how fatphobia affects children and how you to rethink conversations about weight.  And if you like what you hear, check out Virginia's excellent Substack newsletter, Burnt Toast.  Sales and distribution by Lemonada MediaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We take a large bite out of fat trans folk's experiences & unearth some incredible lessons about desire, wellness, design, language, love and so much more. In December of 2022, the Midwest Institute for Sexuality & Gender Diversity hosted the 6th annual Transgender Justice Teach-In and invited TK Morton, Dr. Jonathan Higgins, and Shane Smoore to participate in a discussion about the intersections of being fat, trans, and nonbinary. This episode is the recording from that live webinar. Additional Resources & References Check out the YouTube recording & learn more about the panelists of the 6th annual Transgender Justice Teach-In Virginia Sole-Smith, host of the Burnt Toast podcast, chats with NPR about her new book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture Imani Barbarin aka Crutches&Spice stitches a clip of Ali C. Lopez discussing the fetishization of Blackness, transness, disability and fatness on the Whatever podcast  For questions, comments or feedback about this episode: lastbite@sgdinstitute.org We're on TikTok! You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or at sgdinstitute.org Host: R.B. Brooks, they/them, director of programs for the Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity Cover art: Adrienne McCormick ★ Support this podcast ★

Join us as we chat more about the rules we put in place surrounding food when it comes to the little ones in our lives. Do we put parameters around when they can eat dessert? Do we insist they eat everything on their plate? Do we limit the number of items they may eat? Henny goes down memory lane, and while she hasn't fact-checked it all, she's pretty sure she remembers her experiences at fat camp correctly. Finally, Sandy is on the precipice of trying something new: a Supper Club! Sounds tasty!   **Show Notes** Book we mentioned: Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith Podcast we mentioned: Maintenance Phase

Welcome journalist and author Virginia Sole-Smith to The Whole View! This week, Stacy and Virginia break down anti-fat bias, the problem with body positivity, and giving our children the gift of body autonomy and safety in the age of diet culture. Trigger warning: We will be talking about diet culture and all associations and derivatives of it, including disordered eating. Please be mindful and take care of your needs accordingly. Find Virginia: virginiasolesmith.substack.com instagram.com/v_solesmith twitter.com/v_solesmith tiktok.com/@v_solesmith Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole Smith Don't forget to subscribe to this channel and visit realeverything.com! If you haven't yet unlocked our bonus content, checkout patreon.com/thewholeview. Your subscription goes to support this show and gets you direct access to submit your questions! We also want to give a big thank you to this week's sponsors! TryNom.com/WHOLEVIEW | Get 50% off your no-risk 2-week trial Indeed.com/WHOLEVIEW | Get a $75 sponsored job credit JustThriveHealth.com/discount/wholeview | Use code WHOLEVIEW for 15% off sitewide Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even with cultural messaging about body positivity, talking to children about weight is still tricky. Journalist Virginia Sole-Smith joins guest host Courtney Collins to discuss the ways we talk about bigger bodies, dieting and inclusion with kids – and about the pressures parents feel to get it right. Her book is “Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.”

Virginia Sole-Smith is the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. Her reporting on diet culture, health and parenting has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications. She also writes the popular anti-diet newsletter Burnt Toast and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast.   Grab her book on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/3PalAlH     Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith | Substack     Self-Care: Virginia loves to do jiggle saw puzzles as a main self-care activity. She does not let her kids put in the last piece.  She loves discrete objects on a colorful background.  She's not striving for puzzle excellence; she is just doing it for enjoyment.      Family Fun-- Watching Gilmore Girls with her nine-year-old.  Family walks in the woods, gardening, and kids play in proximity near her.    Find me on Instagram:  Happiest Mom You Know (@everyday_runner_christy) • Instagram photos and videos Don't forget to leave a rating or review. Email me Play4life.Christy@gmail.com 

Virginia Sole-Smith is an author, writer and host of the podcast Burnt Toast — and her work focuses on our relationship to food and fat. Her latest book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture is based on one simple idea: it's okay and normal for kids to be fat. "What fat kids need is to know that we see them, we accept them, and we know they are worthy of respect, safety, and dignity," she writes. "Making their body smaller isn't the solution." Virginia sits down with host Brittany Luse to discuss why anti-fat bias hurts people of all body sizes, why we need to rethink "unhealthy" foods and how to have the fat talk. You can follow us on Twitter @NPRItsBeenAMin and email us at ibam@npr.org.

Join us as we chat about how to talk about fatness, diet culture, and healthy living with children. Henny admits to a seriously problematic thing that she has said (on numerous occasions) to students, and Sandy is both horrified and satisfied to learn that Henny is, indeed, a flawed individual. We also go down memory lane to remember times in our lives that we have identified as particularly great. What was your best year?   **Show Notes** Book we mentioned: Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith

Diet culture permeates our society. And that's impacting our kids. Children as young as 3 learn to associate being fat with negative traits, and anti-fat bias can be found in the doctor's office, in the classroom and on the sports field. In her new book “Fat Talk,” author Virginia Sole-Smith argues we need to take a new approach to how we navigate and discuss fatness and anti-fat bias with our children. Because the current stigmatization isn't making our kids any healthier. We talk with Sole-Smith about why the word “fat” is OK to use, how to talk about body size and why diets — even those masked as lifestyle changes — can backfire with children and adults. Guests: Virginia Sole-Smith, journalist and author, "Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture," and "Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America;" she also publishes the newsletter "Burnt Toast"

Anna, Anna and Elizabeth discuss how a proliferation of problematic and sometimes outright false nutrition information on social media makes it increasingly difficult for parents and teens to discern good nutrition information from bad. We discuss:  The problem with popular accounts that claim they're anti-diet, weight inclusive, and aligned with Responsive Feeding, but a closer look reveals that their content is not actually aligned with these principals.  How brief sound bites such as those on Tik Tok and IG Reels aren't sufficient to provide feeding advice. The problem with messages suggesting that some foods are better than others, and the negative impact this can have on parents and kids. How encouraging parents to talk to children about food in ways that are not age appropriate only serves to confuse kids. Links:  Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith The Kid's Standing in Clean Eating's Shadow by Laura Thomas Sunny Side Up Nutrition Podcast  Lutz, Alexander & Associates Nutrition Therapy Pinney Davenport Nutrition https://thirdwheeled.com/ https://m8.design/ https://www.sonics.io/

We've received so many questions about awkward/mean/offensive/weird things your coworkers have said and done... that we had to make a whole episode about just that. Virginia Sole-Smith, author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, joins host Anne Helen Petersen to help listeners figure out what to say, how to say it, and when to just go straight to HR.Need advice about a sticky situation at work? Let us know at www.workappropriate.com.Order Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture at Bookshop.org. Use promo code WORK to get 10% off!Follow @CrookedMedia on Instagram and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events.

Author and journalist Virginia Sole-Smith joins us to discuss the allure of wellness approaches for those with chronic pain and illness, her experience navigating endometriosis and migraines in diet and wellness culture, the difficulty of describing pain, the notes of orthorexia and fatphobia that show up in otherwise helpful kid-feeding philosophies, her book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, and more.Virginia Sole-Smith is the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. As a journalist, she has reported from kitchen tables and grocery stores, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid's tail. Virginia began her career in women's magazines, alternatively challenging beauty standards and gender norms, and upholding diet culture through her health, nutrition and fitness reporting. Motherhood inspired a reckoning, and led to her first book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Scientific American and many other publications. Virginia now writes the popular anti-diet newsletter Burnt Toast and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast.If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it! You can also sign up to get it in your inbox each week (with a full transcript) at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Pre-order Christy's new book, The Wellness Trap, for its April 25 release, and get access to an exclusive webinar discussing the book by submitting your proof of purchase at christyharrison.com/bookbonus!If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.com/subscribe

On this week's episode of The Waves, we're doing a very special Mom and Dad Are Fighting crossover with host Jamilah Lemieux. Jamilah sits down with author Virginia Sole-Smith to talk about her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. They discuss helping kids accept their bodies in whatever form they take, dealing with our own internalized fatphobia, and more. In Slate Plus, answering a listener's question on secret snacking. If you liked this episode, check out Making Friends As An Adult. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work. Make an impact this Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month by helping Macy's on their mission to fund APIA Scholars. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once we know what anti-fat bias is, it's easy to see it everywhere: in our schools, our doctors' offices, even in our own parenting. Virginia Sole-Smith, author of the new book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, explains the perniciousness of anti-fat bias and how we can start to move away from its toxic messages. Virginia Sole-Smith is also the author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. Virginia's reporting on diet culture, health and parenting has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications. Virginia also writes the popular anti-diet newsletter Burnt Toast and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. Virginia, Amy, and Margaret discuss: What anti-fat bias really is— and why it's everywhere How anti-fat bias shows up in parenting How we can identify and navigate anti-fat bias as people and as parents Here's where you can find Virginia: virginiasolesmith.substack.com @v_solesmith on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok Burnt Toast Podcast Buy Virginia's book: https://bookshop.org/a/12099/9781250831217 We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: https://www.whatfreshhellpodcast.com/p/promo-codes/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, we're doing a very special Mom and Dad Are Fighting crossover with host Jamilah Lemieux. Jamilah sits down with author Virginia Sole-Smith to talk about her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. They discuss helping kids accept their bodies in whatever form they take, dealing with our own internalized fatphobia, and more. In Slate Plus, answering a listener's question on secret snacking. If you liked this episode, check out Making Friends As An Adult. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work. Make an impact this Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month by helping Macy's on their mission to fund APIA Scholars. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode: Jamilah Lemieux sits down with journalist Virginia Sole-Smith to discuss her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. This conversation is a special collaboration with Slate's The Waves podcast. Virginia talks about the body shame kids face, reclaiming the word ‘fat,' and supporting kids in the bodies they're in. They also talk about how parents, grandparents, and other figures in kids' lives can dismantle fatphobia and other learned behaviors that perpetuate our current culture. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on Mom and Dad are Fighting. Sign up now at slate.com/momanddadplus to help support our work. Join us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to ask us new questions, tell us what you thought of today's show, and give us ideas about what we should talk about in future episodes. You can also call our phone line: (646) 357-9318!  Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, we're doing a very special Mom and Dad Are Fighting crossover with host Jamilah Lemieux. Jamilah sits down with author Virginia Sole-Smith to talk about her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. They discuss helping kids accept their bodies in whatever form they take, dealing with our own internalized fatphobia, and more. In Slate Plus, answering a listener's question on secret snacking. If you liked this episode, check out Making Friends As An Adult. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work. Make an impact this Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month by helping Macy's on their mission to fund APIA Scholars. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, we're doing a very special Mom and Dad Are Fighting crossover with host Jamilah Lemieux. Jamilah sits down with author Virginia Sole-Smith to talk about her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. They discuss helping kids accept their bodies in whatever form they take, dealing with our own internalized fatphobia, and more. In Slate Plus, answering a listener's question on secret snacking. If you liked this episode, check out Making Friends As An Adult. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work. Make an impact this Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month by helping Macy's on their mission to fund APIA Scholars. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode: Jamilah Lemieux sits down with journalist Virginia Sole-Smith to discuss her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. This conversation is a special collaboration with Slate's The Waves podcast. Virginia talks about the body shame kids face, reclaiming the word ‘fat,' and supporting kids in the bodies they're in. They also talk about how parents, grandparents, and other figures in kids' lives can dismantle fatphobia and other learned behaviors that perpetuate our current culture. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on Mom and Dad are Fighting. Sign up now at slate.com/momanddadplus to help support our work. Join us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to ask us new questions, tell us what you thought of today's show, and give us ideas about what we should talk about in future episodes. You can also call our phone line: (646) 357-9318!  Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, we're doing a very special Mom and Dad Are Fighting crossover with host Jamilah Lemieux. Jamilah sits down with author Virginia Sole-Smith to talk about her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. They discuss helping kids accept their bodies in whatever form they take, dealing with our own internalized fatphobia, and more. In Slate Plus, answering a listener's question on secret snacking. If you liked this episode, check out Making Friends As An Adult. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work. Make an impact this Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month by helping Macy's on their mission to fund APIA Scholars. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, we're doing a very special Mom and Dad Are Fighting crossover with host Jamilah Lemieux. Jamilah sits down with author Virginia Sole-Smith to talk about her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. They discuss helping kids accept their bodies in whatever form they take, dealing with our own internalized fatphobia, and more. In Slate Plus, answering a listener's question on secret snacking. If you liked this episode, check out Making Friends As An Adult. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work. Make an impact this Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month by helping Macy's on their mission to fund APIA Scholars. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, we're doing a very special Mom and Dad Are Fighting crossover with host Jamilah Lemieux. Jamilah sits down with author Virginia Sole-Smith to talk about her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. They discuss helping kids accept their bodies in whatever form they take, dealing with our own internalized fatphobia, and more. In Slate Plus, answering a listener's question on secret snacking. If you liked this episode, check out Making Friends As An Adult. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Rosemary Belson with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you'll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work. Make an impact this Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month by helping Macy's on their mission to fund APIA Scholars. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Cheryl sits down with her very first roommate and life long friend, Ali. Ali is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a Doctorate in Social Work and Implementation Science.  Ali's specific line of work is working with people who struggle with eating disorders. Cheryl and Ali talk about the clinical and scientific types of eating disorders, where they may stem from, and how you can get help. The second half of the podcast, Ali and Cheryl start talking about how we can break the cycle in our homes so that we don't pass on disordered eating habits to our children. This episode is full of information, questions you should ask yourself and ways you can start to change things in your home, today. Please see the notes below for books and websites recommended by Ali, if you want to learn more about this topic.Follow on Instagram: @Rassy6Websites:https://www.eatingdisorderhope.comhttps://www.nationaleatingdisorders.orghttps://www.therecoveryvillage.comBooks for parents:-Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture-The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America-"I'm, Like, So Fat":Helping yoru teen make healthy choices about eating and     exercise in a weight-obsessed world.-Raising Body Positive TeensBooks for adults who struggle:The F*ck It DietMore Than a BodyHealth At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight*This episode is sponsored by The GoodLC.

Today's interview is with Virginia Sole-Smith, author of the brand-new book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. Virginia writes the Substack Burnt Toast and is also the author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. In this episode, we're chatting about how body ideals interrupt the task of raising kids to have a healthy relationship with food, how the Division of Responsibility can be co-opted into a diet, how to get dads on board with the anti-diet movement and more. Find out more about Virginia here and follow her on Instagram and Tik Tok here. Resources mentioned in this interview: Virginia's newsletter pieces: What If I Can't Say "Fat?" What Instagram Gets Wrong About Feeding Your Kids  "I Love a Beautiful Home, But it Doesn't Rank Higher than Being Able to Function in My Space." Christy Harrison's Anti-Diet The American Academy of Pediatrics Clinical Report: Preventing Obesity and Eating Disorders in Adolescents Virginia's opinion piece for The New York Times Why the New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me Join the Raising Anti-Diet Kids Facebook Group. Learn more about Diana's coaching services: Tiny Seed Family Nutrition. Follow Diana on Instagram and Facebook.

Do you agree that we live in a world that equates body size with a person's value? What is our society teaching our kids about fat, body size, and a person's worth? If you experienced body-size shaming as you grew up, don't you want to do a better job with your children? Parenting around these topics is not easy, and my guest today wrote a book to help us understand more. I'm excited for this conversation with Virginia Sole-Smith, author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and host of the Burnt Toast podcast. Join us to learn more! Show Highlights: Why parents struggle with fears and concerns around their kids' body sizes Why the goal is to have kids who don't feel anxious about their relationship with food Why we need to think about health as MUCH more than a number on the scale Why, to embrace body diversity, we need to challenge what we've been trained to think about health, beauty, and morality How weight distribution matches up with “thin privilege” and anti-fat bias How focusing too closely on our personal weight struggles causes us to reinforce and perpetuate fat bias in the world How our children receive messaging around body types and sizes from healthcare providers, sports coaches, etc.  How to have healthy conversations with kids about bodies, fat, diets, etc.  Why parents need to give counter programming to the default settings our kids receive from society about topics such as body shaming and racism Why Virginia included in her book a chapter called “Straight White Dads on Diets”  Resources: Connect with Virginia Sole-Smith: Website, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Burnt Toast podcast, and Fat Talk book Connect with KC: TikTok, Instagram, and Website  Get KC's book, How to Keep House While Drowning We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes

I heard about Virginia Sole-Smith's new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, a few months ago and was so excited I immediately insisted on reading it and interviewing her. I'm a big fan of Virginia's — she is a journalist, an author, a podcaster, the writer of the excellent Substack newsletter Burnt Toast, and a mom. Her new book is about kids and weight and food, and I think it is an absolute must-read for all parents, especially for that moment when your child asks, “Does this shirt make me look fat?” and you know there is a right thing to say, but in the moment you don't know what it is and instead you melt into a floor puddle, never to be seen again. ParentData relaunched in September 2023. Please enjoy this episode of the earlier version of the podcast from our archives. You can read transcripts and listen to all of our episodes at parentdata.org/podcast. Want more on data, pregnancy, and parenting? Subscribe to the ParentData newsletter for free at parentdata.org.

Today is a very special episode: You are all going to be the very, very first people to hear me read Chapter 1 of FAT TALK: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, which comes out in just 5 days, on April 25. We are excerpting this from the audiobook, which I got to narrate. If you love what you hear, I hope you will order the audiobook or the hardcover (or if you're in the UK and the Commonwealth, the paperback) anywhere you buy books. Split Rock has signed copies and don't forget that when you order from them, you can also take 10 percent off anything in the Burnt Toast Bookshop.If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.LINKSThat photo by Katy Grannanarchived in the National Portrait Gallery's Catalog of American PortraitsAnamarie Regino on Good Morning AmericaLisa Belkin's NYT Magazine articlea report published in Children's Voicea judge ordered two teenagers into foster care2010 analysis published in the DePaul Journal of Health Care LawFat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American CultureFearing the Black BodyHilde Bruch's research papersNational Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran wrote the first “Fat Manifesto”Several studies from the 1960sresearchers revisited the picture ranking experimentthe 1999–2000 NHANES showed a youth obesity rate of 13.9 percentreaching 19.3 percent in the 2017–2018 NHANESData collected from 1976 to 1980 showed that 15 percent of adults met criteria for obesity.By 2007, it had risen to 34 percent.The most recent NHANES data puts the rate of obesity among adults at 42.4 percent.The NHANES researchers determine our annual rate of obesity by collecting the body mass index scores of about 5,000 Americans (a nationally representative sample) each year.A major shift happened in 1998, when the National Institutes of Health's task force lowered the BMI's cutoff points for each weight category, a math equation that moved 29 million Americans who had previously been classified as normal weight or just overweight into the overweight and obese categories.in 2005, epidemiologists at the CDC and the National Cancer Institute published a paper analyzing the number of deaths associated with each of these weight categories in the year 2000 and found that overweight BMIs were associated with fewer deaths than normal weight BMIs.in 2013, Flegal and her colleagues published a systematic literature review of ninety-seven such papers, involving almost three million participants, and concluded, again, that having an overweight BMI was associated with a lower rate of death than a normal BMI in all of the studies that had adequately adjusted for factors like age, sex, and smoking status.But in 2021, years after retiring, Flegal published an article in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that details the backlash her work received from obesity researchers.After her paper was published, former students of the obesity researchers most outraged by Flegal's work took to Twitter to recall how they were instructed not to trust her analysis because Flegal was “a little bit plump herself.”the BMI-for-age chart used in most doctors' offices today is based on what children weighed between 1963 and 1994. a 1993 study by researchers at the United States Department of Health and Human Services titled “Actual Causes of Death in the United States.” the study's authors published a letter to the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine saying, “You [ . . . ] cited our 1993 paper as claiming ‘that every year 300,000 deaths in the United States are caused by obesity.' That is not what we claimed.”“Get in Shape, Girl!”The Fat Studies ReaderToo Fat for Chinaas I reported for the New York Times Magazine in 2019, it has become a common practice for infertility clinics to deny in vitro fertilization and other treatments to mothers above a certain body weightMichelle Obama 2016 speech, another speech, a 2010 speech to the School Nutrition Association, 2013 speechMarion Nestle, a 2011 blog postfood insecurity impacted 21 percent of all American households with children when Obama was elected TheHill.com story on SNAP“I could live on French fries,” she told the New York Times in 2009, explaining that she doesn't because “I have hips.”Ellyn Satter's an open letter to Obamaseveral other critiques of “Let's Move"“I don't want our children to be weight-obsessed"The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and also co-hosts mailbag episodes!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

In today's episode I speak with Virginia Sole-Smith, author of the new book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. We explore anti-fat bias and fat phobia, and how weight, health and beauty have gotten tangled up with notions of morality. Virginia explains how (and why) our culture has become so afraid of fat, and how this fat phobia has resulted in real systems of oppression where humans are valued according to their weight. Virginia explores what it means to be healthy, and the fallacy of linking weight to health. We talk about diet culture and how restriction just doesn't work, and Virginia offers real tips on how we can start to change the system and gain body autonomy.We also talk about feeding our kids, and how we can raise children who have body autonomy. She offers tips for teaching our kids that their bodies belong to them and that all bodies are equal. This episode is so expanding, whether or not you have children. As always, if it resonates, you can support this work by rating the podcast on your podcast app, leaving comment or sharing it with friends.*Mind, Body, Spirit, FOOD newsletter: https://mindbodyspiritfood.substack.com/*Find Nicki on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nickisizemore/* Virginia's Book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture: https://bit.ly/m/virginiasolesmith* Find Virginia on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/v_solesmith/ Get full access to Mind, Body, Spirit, FOOD at mindbodyspiritfood.substack.com/subscribe

This week we're tackling three big ideas about sugar: It causes hyperactivity in kids, it's as addictive as cocaine and it raises blood sugar in universal, predictably spiky ways.  Thanks to David Johnston for helping us with sources for this week's episode!Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastLinks!Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole SmithSugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness by Karen ThrosbyIs sugar really as addictive as cocaine? Scientists row over effect on body and brainSugar Is Not the EnemyDr. Benjamin F. Feingold, Controversial PediatricianIs There Such a Thing as a ‘Sugar High'?Effects of Diets High in Sucrose or Aspartame on The Behavior and Cognitive Performance of ChildrenSugar and the Hyperactive ChildSome popular diets are based on this carb-rating scale. Here's why it could be misleading.Glycemic Index: History and Clinical ApplicationGlycemic Index and Glycemic Load Low glycaemic index or low glycaemic load diets for overweight and obesityWhat is the glycaemic indexDon't Play a Numbers Game, Experts Say, Just Eat Your VegetablesSugar addiction: the state of the scienceThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Shanna and Laura continue the conversation with special guest Virginia Sole-Smith about how to approach feeding our children in a way that promotes confidence and body autonomy rather than deprivation, fatphobia, sugar phobia and diet culture. Virginia is the author of the upcoming book "Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture" and the host of the "Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith" podcast. This is Part 2 of a two-part interview. To hear the first part of our interview with Virginia, listen to Episode 248: Diet Culture and Parenting: An Interview with Virginia Sole-Smith - Part 1. Also, Laura reports on entering a very intense limit-setting phase with her two-year-old, and Shanna talks about how paying attention to her own sensory needs has helped her find grace in some of her parenting struggles. Finally, Shanna and Laura share their BFPs and BFNs for the week. Shanna's kids are 4 and 7 years old, and Laura's kids are 4 years old and 2 years old.Want to get in touch with Shanna and Laura? Send us an email and follow us on social! Instagram, Facebook or TikTok at @bfppodcast.This episode's show notes can be found here.Join our Facebook community group for support and camaraderie on your parenting journey.Visit our website!Big Fat Positive: A Pregnancy and Parenting Journey is produced by Laura Birek, Shanna Micko and Steve Yager.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Anna Lutz and Elizabeth Davenport chat with Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist and author of the recently published book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, that investigates how the “war on childhood obesity” has caused kids of all ages to absorb a daily onslaught of body shame from peers, school, diet culture, and parents themselves — and offers research-based strategies to help parents name and navigate the anti-fat bias that infiltrates our schools, doctor's offices and family dinner tables. They discuss: What prompted Virginia to write her book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.  Where the idea that parents are responsible for their child's weight comes from, and how it is harmful, especially to nonwhite populations. How weight bias impacts kids and parents, and how parents can advocate for their children at appointments.  How the impact of dads' relationships with food and exercise is seldom discussed and seldom researched. The prevalence of diet culture in school, sports, and other activities, and ways  parents can advocate for their kids when they experience anti-fat bias and diet culture in these environments. Some things parents can do to make their home a safe space from diet culture, particularly for those to whom challenging diet culture and anti-fat bias is new. Links:  Virginia Sole-Smith Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture Sunny Side Up Nutrition Podcast  Lutz, Alexander & Associates Nutrition Therapy Pinney Davenport Nutrition https://thirdwheeled.com/ https://m8.design/ https://www.sonics.io/ As a journalist, Virginia Sole-Smith has reported from kitchen tables and grocery stores, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid's tail. Virginia's latest book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, investigates how the “war on childhood obesity” has caused kids of all ages to absorb a daily onslaught of body shame from peers, school, diet culture, and parents themselves — and offers research-based strategies to help parents name and navigate the anti-fat bias that infiltrates our schools, doctor's offices and family dinner tables. Virginia began her career in women's magazines, alternatively challenging beauty standards and gender norms, and upholding diet culture through her health, nutrition and fitness reporting. Motherhood inspired a reckoning of harm caused, and led to her first book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America, in which Virginia explored how we can reconnect to our bodies, and our own innate understanding of how to eat, in a culture that's constantly giving us so many mixed messages about both those things. Virginia is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Her work also appears in the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and many other publications. She writes the newsletter Burnt Toast, where she explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health, and also hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. Virginia lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her husband, two daughters, a cat, a dog, and way too many houseplants.

Laura and Shanna welcome special guest Virginia Sole-Smith, author of the upcoming book "Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture," to talk about what diet culture is, how it affects us as parents, why we should not be encouraging weight loss in children, how to navigate the anti-fat bias present in the medical system (as a pregnant person and as a parent), and more. This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. Tune in next week to hear the rest of our conversation! Also, Shanna reports on her anxiety showing up in a very unexpected parenting situation, and Laura reports on taking her two- and four-year-olds to their yearly checkups at the pediatrician. Finally, Shanna and Laura share their BFPs and BFNs for the week. Shanna's kids are 4 and 7 years old, and Laura's kids are 4 years old and 2 years old.Want to get in touch with Shanna and Laura? Send us an email and follow us on social! Instagram, Facebook or TikTok at @bfppodcast.This episode's show notes can be found here.Join our Facebook community group for support and camaraderie on your parenting journey.Visit our website!Big Fat Positive: A Pregnancy and Parenting Journey is produced by Laura Birek, Shanna Micko and Steve Yager.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Virginia Sole-Smith joins us for the full hour today to talk about the launch of her latest book, “Fat Talk - Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.” Sole-Smith believes that we need to change the way we talk about weight and not teach our kids to be judgemental if someone is overweight. Weight should not be a defining factor when it comes to someone's ability or character. As a journalist, Virginia has reported from kitchen tables and grocery stores, graduated from beauty school and gone swimming in a mermaid's tail.  Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Elle and many other publications. Virginia's latest book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, is available to pre-order on Amazon.com and comes out on April 25th! Thank you to our sponsors!Enviromedica – The BEST probiotics on the planetChildren's Health Defense - Listen every Monday for Bern and Mary Holland, President of CHD! KetoCon - April 21st-23rd at the Palmer Events Center in Austin, TX. Get tix by April 1st and use the code OLR for $50 off the already discounted price. Sunwarrior - Use the code OLR for 20% off your purchase!Well Being JournalThorne - Get 20% off your order and free shipping!

Cristina interviews Virginia Sole-Smith about her newest book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture; where she explores the impact the “war on childhood obesity” has caused kids of all ages to absorb a daily onslaught of body shame. She offers research-based strategies to help parents name and navigate the anti-fat bias that...

I'm joined by Virginia Sole-Smith, Author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. We're talking about how our culture is fixated on both the health and therefore weight of children, as well as helping them be body positive and how these two conflict. She talks about how fat phobia shows up at the dinner table, the influence of social media on how we feed our kids, the role of fathers, and how to raise kids that fight anti-fat bias and advocate for change. Show notes: summerinnanen.com/258 In this episode, we talk about: - The common refrain Virginia was noticing in conversations with parents and the realization it led to, - That we're seeing an epidemic of kids not feeling safe in their bodies, - That you can't talk about wanting to change kid's body sizes, without talking about the clear harm this has caused, - That we are all victims of diet culture, and we can all perpetuate diet culture, - Advice for parents taking a child to the doctor, - How to invite your child to think critically about the messages they're receiving from a young age, - Plus so much more! Get the shownotes: summerinnanen.com/258 Get the free 10-Day Body Confidence Makeover with 10 steps to feel better in your body at summerinnanen.com/freebies If you're a professional who has clients or students that struggle with body image, get the Body Image Coaching Roadmap for professionals at summerinnanen.com/roadmap

Caring for kids in the age of diet culture is hugely challenging because in all arenas of kids' lives, they're exposed to anti-fat bias. Virginia Sole-Smith (she/her) talks us through how to equip our children to recognize anti-fatness when they experience it at school, on their sports teams, and at the doctor's office.Virginia Sole-Smith is the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. As a journalist, she has reported from kitchen tables and grocery stores, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid's tail. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Scientific American and many other publications. She also writes the popular anti-diet newsletter Burnt Toast and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast.Please check out Virginia's forthcoming book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, and her newsletter and podcast, Burnt Toast. She's also on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.The feminist romance writers Virginia mentioned that bring her joy are Jasmine Guillory, Talia Hibbert, and Helen Hoang.This episode's poem is Butter by Connie Wanek.All things Fat Joy can be found on the website: http://www.fatjoy.lifeHave you rated us in your podcast app yet?? Please do!And if you're a Patreon supporter, be sure to go watch Some Extra Fat Joy: 10 Q's with Virginia Sole-Smith.. If you'd like this bonus content each week, for as little as $2 per month you can help us offer honorariums to our podcast's expert guests, which is key to supporting & centering marginalized voices.Deep thanks for their hard work go to Hi Bird Designs and AR Media for keeping this podcast looking and sounding joyful.

Michael talks with Virginia Sole-Smith about her NY Times Op-Ed "Why the New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me." Smith is the author of "The Eating Instinct" and the forthcoming book (April 2023) "Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture." Original air date 31 January 2023.

This week, we're talking to Debra Benfield, M.Ed., RDN/LDN, RYT. Debra has helped hundreds of women heal their relationship with food, eating, and their bodies in her 35-year career as a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist specializing in the prevention and treatment of disordered eating. Debra brings her wisdom, passion, and lived experience to the intersection of pro-aging and body liberation. Her work is rooted in helping her clients: Recognize internalized ageism and end it; Dismantle internalized diet culture/fat phobia; Nourish their bodies to support vitality in aging; Create ease in the fight to “control” their eating and body size; and develop a respectful partnership with their bodies. She integrates the practices of self-compassion and nervous system regulation withher nutrition and body image coaching to support embodied and sustainablechange.Debra offers 1:1 coaching, small group coaching, and professional supervision. She also owns and administers a private practice of big-hearted and wonderfully talentedRDNs who specialize in weight-neutral care and the treatment of eating disorders.We had an amazing conversation about...The fatphobia in pro-aging spacesThe ageism in fat liberation spacesThe parallels between the anti-aging industry & diet cultureThe ableism in the concept of "aging well"And the importance of interrupting intergenerational diet culture narratives!Debra's new small group coaching program, Aging with Vitality and Body Liberation, is open for enrollment until January 10th! And she's hosting an open house for anyone who wants more information on January 6th at 12pm ET/9am PT. Get all the details at https://www.debrabenfield.com!Or you can connect with Debra via social media on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn!Referenced in this episode:Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-SmithHow to Raise an Intuitive Eater: Raising the Next Generation with Food and Body Confidence by Sumner Brooks & Amee SeversonWant to connect with us to deepen the conversation? Join us in our online community, The Satisfaction Space!Want to show the world that you love the pod? Get t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, stickers, totebags & more at Teepublic!You can stay up to date on all things Satisfaction Factor by following us on IG @satisfactionfactorpod!Here's where to find us:Sadie Simpson: www.sadiesimpson.com or IG @sadiemsimpsonNaomi Katz: www.happyshapes.co or IG @happyshapesnaomi

Kids turn one and our expectations change. Suddenly, we want them to eat for nutrition and “food is fuel.”You're listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast (and newsletter) about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. As you are listening to this podcast today, I am also writing the last pages of my next book. It is called Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. It will be out next April. I'm recording this with still about 6,000 words ahead of me. I'm hoping by the time you're hearing this, it's like a thousand or five hundred words left. Or even none left! That would be great! It's such a weird experience. I love writing books. I love being immersed in the research and the storytelling and the issues that I'm thinking about constantly. But I'm definitely also in the can-no-longer-see-the-forest-for-the-trees stage of this first draft. So, that is how I am feeling. Hopefully, by the time you're listening to this, it will be feeling much closer to relieved and celebratory! Because I am swamped with getting this manuscript finished, I am giving you a couple of weeks of rerun episodes so I can stay firmly locked into book world and do a little less bouncing between book, newsletter, podcast, the way I have been for the last many months. So this week's rerun is a conversation that Amy Palanjian and I had on our old podcast Comfort Food, about emotional eating. This episode first aired on February 27, 2020. And I think it's one where we were actually a little ahead of our time because once Covid happened, the conversation around comfort eating changed. There was so much demonization of comfort eating and stress eating that we did see this really powerful backlash of folks saying, “No wait, actually we're going through a global trauma, making sourdough and enjoying it is a great way to cope with your anxiety.” A lot of that is what Amy and I are talking about in this episode. We are longtime fans of comfort eating—that's why we named the podcast Comfort Food!—and of emotional eating as a benign coping strategy. It's something I continue to talk about: The importance of reclaiming these coping strategies for yourself, of removing the guilt and shame because that's what causes them to feel so harmful. A lot of what we talked about may not feel entirely new to you, if you've been following Burnt Toast for a while, but I do think we hit a lot of the key points really well. If you are struggling with feeling okay about feeding yourself in any way, it should be a really useful lesson. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.And don’t forget! Today is your last day to fill out the reader survey and be entered in the Burnt Toast Book Giveaway! It’s also your last chance to enter the giveaway by becoming a paid subscriber (or renewing an existing subscription if yours was set to expire this month). AND it’s the last day to take 20 percent off that subscription price! PS. If you’ve already done the survey or gotten/renewed a subscription and aren’t sure you entered the giveaway, please fill out this form.And keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.VirginiaHello and welcome to episode 64 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmySo this week we are going to explore the concept of emotional eating and some of the myths and misconceptions that can come up and also to talk about is it okay to eat when you're not physically hungry?VirginiaI'm Virginia Sole-Smith, I'm a writer, a contributor to Parents Magazine and New York Times Parenting, and I'm the author of The Eating Instinct: Food, Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America, which is out in paperback now and it has such a pretty new cover. Maybe I'll get Amy to put a picture in the show notes, you should definitely check it out. Anyway, I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about those things.AmyAnd I'm Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer, and creator of Yummy Toddler Food. And I love helping parents to stop freaking out about what their kids will and won't eat and sharing doable recipes that fit into even the busiest family schedules. Okay, so obviously, the name of our podcast is Comfort Food. So, we think that food should be comforting, but we realized we never explicitly talked about it in depth— about the concept of comfort as it relates to food and why we think it's important.VirginiaYeah. And it's a really fundamental to what we do. I mean, again, we named the podcast after it. I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the other names we went through. I really wanted to call the podcast Burnt Toast, which I still think is a great name. But we couldn't because there was one, even though it’s not around. AmyIt's not a functioning podcast, but yeah.VirginiaSo anyway, if you're listening, and you were affiliated with the prior Burnt Toast podcast, you should give us your name. I mean, we're kind of already here. But Comfort Food felt like the perfect name. I think what we liked about Burnt Toast was that it was like the sort of imperfect, meal on the fly situation that a lot of us are in.AmyWe went through a lot of iterations of something with pasta.VirginiaI know, I really wanted to name it something with pasta. Basically, you can tell from all the foods we considered, we were about comfort food. So then it was like, okay, let's just group it all together into that umbrella.AmyYeah. And you actually wanted to use that phrase in your book title, right?VirginiaYeah, my original title for The Eating Instinct was actually Comfort, Food. Now that feels dumb and a little twee—maybe that's why my agent vetoed it. But I thought that summed up what I was initially hoping to do with the book. My agent and the publisher liked The Eating Instinct better because it was a little more science-y sounding. Naming books is really hard. The reason that I wanted it to be the book title is the book starts with Violet’s story. A really big turning point for us in helping Violet learn to become an oral eater was in the summer of 2016, when she was in and out of the hospital a ton. She had actually gotten off her feeding tube and become a really successful oral eater, and then she got very, very sick again and she stopped eating. I remember being in the ICU with her and these hospital dietitians and doctors swarming and obsessing over why she wasn't eating, what was going on. It was just so clear to me that eating had ceased to offer her any comfort so she had no incentive to do it. It felt like just another horrible thing happening to her body in this really intense medical situation. She didn't turn the corner again, until she found a way to make eating feel safe and comforting. That really opened my eyes to how, in this hospital setting, it doesn't work with a sick kid. They need food to be comforting—we all need that. We are so consistently making nutrition the enemy of comfort and the way we relate to food. So that was really what inspired the book and also a lot of the conversations that Amy and I have.AmySo much of what we hear about nutrition or the way that we're “supposed” to eat is looking at macros and doing it by grams. It's so devoid of any emotion, but that's not what it's like when you sit down at the table. You can't separate the two.VirginiaI mean, it literally doesn't work without it. I think any of us who have successfully fed a baby, you intrinsically get why comfort matters. It is absolutely essential to a baby eating that they feel safe and comfortable. It's this really cozy, bonding, joyous experience to feed a baby, for both the parent and the child. But then suddenly, kids turn one and our expectations change and we want them to eat all these different foods, but now it's for “nutrition” and “food is fuel.” We want them to think of food as just this way to grow their bodies, but we're just much more anxious about comfort. A lot of the research I did for the book really showed that we are biologically programmed to seek comfort in food. This is a feature, not a bug. We evolved to do it because human survival depends on us eating so often. We have to eat very regularly—and babies in particular have to eat, over and over and over again, all day long. If we didn't find it inherently pleasurable and comforting, we wouldn't do it. Especially generations ago, when food was scarce and it was hard to do. We need this, this is fundamental to the whole thing.Amy PalanjianSo, last week Selway had his 12 month checkup and on the little paper that they gave us, it was like, “Your baby should be weaned off a bottle at this point.” Virginia Whoa. Whoa there.AmyLet's back up and look at like the emotional attachment that that baby might have. For adults, it's been drilled into us that we are supposed to eat when we're hungry and stop when we're full. And if we eat for any other reason, then we're doing something wrong. We feel guilty and we've failed ourselves.VirginiaYeah, I think both Christy Harrison and Evelyn Tribole have talked about that in their episodes on the podcast. There's a misconception that when you talk about intuitive eating, you're talking about the hunger/fullness diet. I actually had a friend, a few months ago, we were out getting ice cream, and she was like, “Oh, I'd love to have that but I'm not hungry and I'm doing intuitive eating, so I'm not gonna eat the ice cream.” And I was like, “Oh, no. That's not what it means. It doesn't mean you only eat when you experience physical hunger.” You can also eat because we're out with our kids eating ice cream and we want to share that. That is this other piece of it. We are both of these things.AmySo we're going to run through a few common myths about comfort food and emotional eating. Myth number one: Eating to comfort yourself is always bad.VirginiaI mean, that's what people think, right? They think the cliche of having a pint of ice cream after a breakup or wanting cheesy crackers when you're stressed out is somehow this big failure. But eating something tasty to cheer yourself up after a hard day is totally normal. It's totally human. And it's also a totally fine coping strategy.AmyI have come to terms with the fact that I always need some sort of chocolate at the end of the day. It has nothing to do with like my overall nutritional intake. It just makes me feel better.VirginiaYeah. I mean, you have three children running around your house!AmyI made it to the end of the day, guys!VirginiaYou made it to bedtime, you need chocolate. Yeah, I struggled with this when we were in the hospital for so many months with Violet. Some people when they're undergoing extreme trauma totally lose their appetite and stop eating. I've had friends say to me, “This is really hard. People will praise this weight loss, but actually my life's falling apart. It’s not really for a good reason.” So, you know, that definitely happens. I do not respond to trauma that way. I respond to trauma by seeking comfort in food. I did a lot of comfort eating during those years of Violet being so sick. I had to really kind of come to terms with that. I struggled with it. Like, oh, I shouldn't be comfort eating. Then finally, I was like, “You know what? I am eating this chocolate croissant in a corner of an ICU hospital. This is what's getting me through the day. I am glad it is here for me.” There is nothing wrong with it. It's a form of taking care of yourself, for sure. It just gets such a bad rap. Christy Harrison and I did an event for our books recently, and when we were doing the audience Q&A, a new mom raised her hand. She said, “You know, I really think I'm an emotional eater. Especially now that my baby's three months old, it just feels like I can't even have chocolate in the house because I can't stop eating it.” And we were both just like, of course you need chocolate, you are three months postpartum. You're not sleeping. Your life has been thrown up in the air. Give yourself this grace.AmyYou're grasping at straws for something to sort of make you feel a little bit better in the moment. I have this lactation cookie, which I'm renaming to be just mama cookies, and it has chocolate in it purely because I know that having that thirty seconds of something that tastes good in your mouth is incredibly helpful when you're taking care of a small child. You're super, super tired and you just need that small window of pleasure.VirginiaYou literally can't get more sleep probably, that’s not available to you. Like, probably you wouldn't crave the chocolate quite as much if you were getting nine hours of sleep a night, but that's not going to happen for a long time. The solution is not to deprive yourself of this other thing, it's to meet what need you can. That’s a way to reframe it.AmyMyth number two: Feeling compulsive around food is the same as emotionally eating.VirginiaThis is interesting because people often label something as emotional eating when what they really mean is, it's hard for me to stop eating X. Like, If I have a bag of potato chips, I'm going to eat the whole bag. Or, if I see a plate of brownies, I'm going to need to eat the whole plate of brownies. They think that this means they're eating emotionally, when it may just mean that they feel restricted about that food. They've restricted it for so long, and now they can't anymore. That's why they're eating in that uncontrollable, scary-feeling way. This is a really big misconception about binge eating disorder, that it's somehow really different from anorexia or bulimia, these other eating disorders that are more obviously restriction-based. People think, binge eating disorder, those people just eat all the time, they can never stop. But all the new research on it is showing in around 40% of cases, it's a response to restriction. Somebody has been on a more restrictive plan, or diet, or full anorexia, and then it hits a brick wall and it goes the other way. Binge eating disorder is a whole complicated thing, we don't have to get into all of it, but a lot of cases are also people responding to growing up with intense food insecurity. Not having enough food in your house is also a form of restriction. It's kind of threaded throughout. I think it's important to understand that because we punish the symptom—eating in this uncontrollable way—without dealing what's really causing that. I think for a lot of us, even if you're not in an extreme place with it, that feeling of “I can't control myself around this food",” what you really need to ask is, why are you restricting this food? Why are you not able to give yourself permission to enjoy it when it's here?AmyYeah, and I think if you've ever had a child who's been obsessed about one type of food, like goldfish, and then you buy goldfish and allow them to have them for snacks, you don't hide them or restrict them in any way, they lose a lot of their appeal. It becomes very clear that they weren't necessarily wanting to have them so badly because they love them so much, it was the feeling that they loved them and also they were not allowed to have them.VirginiaRight. The love is not the problem, it was the restriction that was the problem. It's also worth noting, there's a difference between using food to comfort yourself in a tough situation or after a tough day, and using food as a way to escape or numb your emotions. That can become a more self destructive way to go, just like drinking to numb your emotions can be destructive. Anytime we're escaping our feelings, it can be worrisome, but it’s not the food that’s the problem. The solution isn't to stop eating those foods, it's to figure out how to deal with the hard feelings and find other coping strategies. And I'd also argue even in the short term, sometimes emotions are too frickin’ big.AmyI was going to say, maybe it's okay to numb your emotions sometimes, if you need to.VirginiaMaybe you can't deal with it all in one day and you'll deal with some more of it tomorrow. Let's not demonize these strategies. It's interesting how much these really normal ways of coping with life become demonized because they don't line up with diet culture expectations. But we of course, blame ourselves. AmyOne thing that has been helpful for me, like if there's something that I feel like I just want to eat the whole thing of, I just ask myself, what if I'm just allowed to eat as much as I want? Does that change the emotional reaction to it? VirginiaDoes it? AmyUsually. I mean, I have asked my significant other that question, too, if there's something that he says he can't have in the house. I'm like, what if you were just allowed to have it? It’s an interesting exercise.VirginiaThat's really interesting. The third Myth is this idea that we should not let our kids eat for comfort either, and that we somehow have to rein in their emotions around food.AmyBack to the baby example, we talked a little bit about weaning. We're not weaning, but like, it's a little bit on my mind. No matter when Selway’s last bottle was, when I pick him up at daycare he always wants me to breastfeed him. That's obviously not about hunger, like, he could have had a bottle within an hour. He wants to do that because it's how he connects with me. VirginiaHe wants to see his mama. AmyIt's a totally normal. That would not be something that would be upsetting to anyone. That's very easy to understand. And I think taking that a few years forward, when the child is isn’t breastfeeding, but also has that relationship with food, it would be kind of weird if they weren't comforted by food, in some ways. VirginiaThis is something that's part of the human experience. Speaking as someone who had a kid who found no comfort and food, it is terrifying, actually, when you take it all the way to that extreme place. One of the most powerful memories of my life is the first time I saw Violet take comfort from food. She was a little older than Selway and snuggled on my lap eating an apple. What the food was doesn't matter, I suddenly had this experience of like, oh, she associates me and food and comfort all together again. The way she should. It's so powerful. We were also talking a little before we started recording about seeing our kids use food in this way is actually a sign that they are self-regulating. Beatrix often will, if something falls apart for her, she immediately says, “Where's my ubby?” which is her lovey, and then like, “I need my snack cup.” I'm not worried that she's addicted to the goldfish or whatever's in the snack cup. She's like, oh, I need some comfort right now. That's pretty cool to see.AmyI don't know that I would want a child to always turn to food for comfort, just as I would want for myself to have different options of things that would make me feel better. But I think having it in the arsenal with other things can be super helpful. I mean, we had a situation where one of the girls was able to calm themselves down, after a pretty horrific screaming battle, with some crackers and cucumber and a book. There's nothing wrong in that situation.VirginiaYeah, so many great strategies that she's using there.AmyI think when that happens, as a parent, your initial reaction might be, “Uh oh. I know she's not hungry. I'm supposed to be teaching her to honor her hunger cues.” But at the same time, I think we need to be aware that sometimes we have to look at the bigger context and realize that in that moment, that was a helpful choice.VirginiaYeah, absolutely. I mean I really talk about comfort as the third eating instinct. We've got hunger and fullness, but comfort is this other really important one. Jennifer Berry has talked about that, too, that it is an internal drive kids have to seek comfort. So, don't dismiss that even if it feels at odds with their hunger. But yes, of course, eventually Selway will not need to nourish the second he sees you at the end of the day. When we were weaning Beatrice’s bottle, we talked about how she wanted to read the exact same bedtime book every night for two weeks while we were dropping the bottles, because that was the new comfort thing. She wanted Curious George over and over and over. We can definitely encourage kids to find these other tools, but don't be afraid of the food.AmyThis was on my mind after the Super Bowl. I was thinking about how holiday foods can offer this type of—or food traditions— can offer comfort in this way, too. My husband grew up, he didn't have a TV, but his grandparents did. So on Super Bowl Sunday, he went to his grandparents and his grandfather and made him a root beer float. So he's always wanted to share that tradition with us. And at this point in time, my girls don't like the carbonation in drinks, so they don't like soda. The idea of having soda poured on ice cream is like ruining ice cream for them. So they were like, we just want the ice cream. And I don't know, a root beer float? It's not my favorite thing. But I realized after, I didn't handle that well. Because this is something that means a lot to him. There could have been a way that we could have all shared that experience, taking comfort in the food experience. There was a bigger meaning to that where it was more than just the food.VirginiaHe wanted to tell the story of drinking root beer floats with his granddad and that kind of thing. And you could have shared that while possibly serving the root beer in glasses separate from the ice cream.AmyOr we could have showed the girls what happens when we pour the root beer. It could have been the coolest science experiment. Like there could have been ways that we could have all shared the experience. The way that it turned out just was really disappointing. But I mean, this happens. Now with a lot of people having very specific dietary restrictions, this happens at the holidays, where the foods that you once were able to share with everyone, you can’t. Where do all of those feelings go, about those foods that you love when you can't share them in the same way?VirginiaThat's really tough. You see this on both sides. You see both the person with the restrictions struggling to enjoy their holiday in the same way, and I also feel for the people preparing the food. You know, grandma or whoever makes these amazing cookies every year, and suddenly people aren't eating them. That's a little bit heartbreaking because she's done that to show her love. You have to think about the feelings on both sides of that. It's not to say you can't find new and different traditions, but also that these traditions do really matter and shouldn't just be sort of tossed aside, right?AmyI think we can get laser-focused on the specific food aspect of it when we are in the culture that we're in, that does often boil it down to whether or not it has gluten, or whatever the thing might be.VirginiaThere's so much talk around the holidays about how there's too much focus on food. And to my mind, it's so sad that we can't just let this be about food, because it is. Because, again, that's very fundamental to human experience. To celebrate through food is something that every culture around the world does. This is part of what we do, being able to enjoy that and appreciate it for what it is. Then it doesn't have to dominate in this intense way because, again, you've removed the restriction around it. You can take the comfort from it without feeling this compulsive, out of control thing.AmyOkay, do you guys have questions? Questions about emotional eating or comfort food? We're here to take them on.VirginiaWant me to find the old list of other podcasts names? We can see if any of them are any good. I think we landed on the right one. I think it speaks to our souls.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you'd like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode!And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter. For today (June 30) only, you can take 20 percent off and pay just $4 per month or $40 for the year! You get a ton of cool perks and you keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe