[PREVIEW] A White Man Thought He was Fat and Quit His Job.

You're listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith. Today is the second part of my conversation with Savala Nolan.Savala is a writer, public speaker and professor at UC Berkeley. Her brand new book, Good Woman: A Reckoning is out now. Her first book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize and celebrated as a “standout collection” by the New York Times. Savala's writing has been featured in Vogue, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, NPR, TIME and more.Today is the second part of my conversation with Savala. In part one, we talked about bodies, race and gender. Today in part two, we're getting into sex, divorce and classy and trashy Butters. This conversation is for paid subscribers only, so go to patreon.com/virginiasolesmith to join us. Membership starts at just $5 per month. You're not going to want to miss this one.One last thing! If you order Good Woman from my local independent bookstore, Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off if you have also ordered a copy of my book Fat Talk from them. Go to Split Rock Books and use the code "fat talk" at checkout.Here's Savala.You need to be a paid Just Toast subscriber to listen to this full conversation. Membership starts at just $5 per month!Join Just Toast!🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 237 TranscriptVirginia All right, we've got to talk about men a little bit.Savala  Do we have to? No, I'm kidding. I love them.Virginia  I really questioned whether we did. You write really well about men in this book. You articulate a lot about a certain kind of man that is going to be very familiar to a lot of our listeners. You call him the "voting booth feminist." Define voting booth feminist and tell us how that particular type of man, perhaps without realizing it, contributes to this narrative about what a "good woman" should be.Savala  Well, the voting booth feminist is alive and well, Virginia. I was married to one.

You're listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith. Today my conversation is with none other than the beloved, the brilliant, Lindy West. Lindy is the author of four books, The New York Times bestselling memoir, Shrill, as well as the essay collections, The Witches Are Coming and Shit, Actually, and her brand new memoir Adult Braces, out now.Lindy is a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her work has appeared in This American Life, The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Vulture, Jezebel and many others. She is the co-host of the comedy podcast, Text Me Back!!! and the author of the newsletter Butt News. Lindy was a writer and executive producer on Shrill, the Hulu comedy adapted from her memoir, and she co-wrote and produced the independent feature film, Thin Skin. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula in rural Washington state. Lindy joined me to chat about her brand new memoir, Adult Braces. We get into her relationship to fatness, having people comment rather relentlessly on her marriage, why more best friends should start podcasts and so much more—including a quesadilla she invents in real time while we recorded. You are going to love this one. This conversation with Lindy is so juicy that we're breaking it up into two episodes! In Part 1 we’re talking about her brand new memoir, Adult Braces, as well as her eating disorder therapy, being a public fat person and having people comment on her body and her marriage.In Part 2, we're getting into non-monogamy, the benefits of being in a throuple, podcasting and so much more! If you're already a paid subscriber, you've got both parts of the episode right here, right now in your inbox! Everyone else: Join Burnt Toast today to hear the whole thing! Membership starts at just $5 per month and also gets you commenting privileges.One last thing! You will want to read Adult Braces after hearing this conversation. If you order it from my local independent bookstore, Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off if you have also ordered a copy of my book Fat Talk from them. Go to Split Rock Books and use the code "fat talk" at checkout.Here's Lindy West.If you enjoy this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work!Join Burnt Toast🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Virginia We are here to talk about your new memoir, Adult Braces. My producer Kim and I both read it. We loved it. Like, crying laughing, full body experience reading this book. LindyThank you so much!VirginiaDo you want to give us a brief summary of what the book is about?Lindy  The book is about a road trip that I took in 2021 from Seattle to Key West and back, which I decided to do when I was having a crisis in my life. I needed to get away from my house, and I needed to get away from my family and my responsibilities.I had found out a couple years earlier that my husband had a secret girlfriend, which was sort of illegal in our relationship, sort of not. That was quite a topic of conversation for several years, and we eventually figured it out. But then I was exhausted from a year of COVID and three years of non-stop couples therapy. I was like, I gotta get out of here. So I left and I drove to Florida in a van that I rented. I slept in the van. I just wanted to be out in the world and be brave and alive. The road trip stories are interspersed with chapters about my life before. A big message, at least for me, is that it's really easy to read my crisis as this monogamy/polyamory conversation, but when I think back on it, everything about my life was messed up before that. I had so many other problems, in my mental health, in the way that I managed my career, my life and my brain chemicals. I wanted to build a full picture of that, because I think the easy story is like, 'Oh, no good husband.' But it was a lot more complicated than that, and a lot of it stemmed from work that I had to do on myself, which is ultimately the only work that I can do. I can't do work on my husband.Virginia Nope. A lot of us learned that the hard way.Lindy  Right! That was actually one of my problems. I was constantly waiting for my husband to transform into the person that I had imagined would be my husband, and that's not how people work.Virginia It's annoying, but true. Lindy  It's very annoying. The book is about all of those figurative journeys happening at once, and also my literal journey. Virginia It's spectacular. The van alone. I'm obsessed with the van. There's a mural on the outside of the van. It's incredible.Lindy  The van has a big, scary rabbit on one side and then a big, anxious sheep on the other side. The van was named BAAA, like the noise a sheep makes. I think I'm going to make some social media content out of this. I'm trying to be an influencer in order to promote this book. I want the van. I want that van. I want it in my possession.VirginiaI was sad when you gave it back. LindyI know! Me too, and now the company has gone out of business. I tried to rent the van for my book tour and they don't exist anymore. Someone has that van. I think I'm going to do a social media campaign called "Help me find my van," so that I can buy it.Virginia Burnt Toast listeners, if any of you have a van with a rabbit on one side and a sheep on the other, hit us up. Even if it's a different van with that art, I think Lindy would be interested.LindyYes. I will pay upwards of $1,000.Virginia To get that van back. It was a sad moment. It was like the end of those movies with a person on a journey with an animal, and they say goodbye. It was like the volleyball in that Tom Hanks movie.Lindy  Oh, my God, yeah. I had to watch BAAA float away on the ocean. BAAA had really been there for me. BAAA is an old lady now. Maybe she doesn't exist anymore, because she already had 250,000 miles on her and then I drove her another 50,000.VirginiaShe was in her golden years. LindyShe was in her golden years. But I think those Ford Transit vans are built to last, so I think someone has her. It turns out all the van companies are going out of business because I had a really hard time finding a van. I called three different companies that had all recently gone out of business, because #vanlife is not that popular anymore now that people have #donthavetowearamasklife.Virginia They had a little Renaissance moment there.Lindy  I called this other company that was going out of business, and I was like, "Well, what are you doing with your fleet?" I know the all the terms now. I was like, "What's happening to your fleet? Can I buy one of your vans?" And he was like, "Yeah, they're $90,000." Sorry, excuse me?Virginia It doesn't even have a rabbit on it, sir.Lindy  This van is blank. I think that if there's any hope for me getting a van, it's got to be old lady BAAA. If you're listening and you know where BAAA ended up, please call me.Virginia I mean, I'm now picturing that BAAA probably has a new owner who also really loves her. There's going to be a complicated journey to restore BAAA to her rightful owner, which is you, but ...Lindy  Ok, now that you said that I don't want to take BAAA away from her new family.Virginia Well, maybe it could be a joint custody situation, you know? Let's be open-minded to different family structures.Lindy  That's true. You're so right. God, that was very regressive of me.Virginia But yes, I hope that you can be reunited. LindyThank you.VirginiaAlong with the story of BAAA, you talk about many vulnerable things in the book. One of them that I know our listeners will be really moved by is your exploration of having an eating disorder and starting treatment for that. It was just so relatable. Like when you wrote about reading through the list of nutritionists from your doctor, and only one doesn't mention weight loss. When you're looking for eating disorder treatment! Lindy  It's a snapshot of what most people are going to the nutritionist for: weight loss. That's what everyone's looking for, in every direction. So, I get it, but it was very frustrating. Luckily, the one lady that wasn't weight loss focused is the best person I've ever met, so it all worked out.Virginia What was it like working with someone who was like, "Actually, you don't need to lose weight. You need to eat more food?"Lindy  It's been amazing. I mean, it's frustrating, because you still have the diet culture voice inside your head, even if you've done as much healing as you thought was humanly possible. I realized once I started working with her that some tiny part of my brain had been like, Once you see the nutritionist, maybe you will lose weight. Not that that was my goal. But there's always this little, dee de dee dee, then your life will be perfect. It's really hard to deprogram that. Grace, my now therapist, just kept being like, "Your job is to eat whatever you want all the time." And I'd be like, "Yeah, but what if I want vegetables?" She was like, "That's fine, but you're not allowed to not eat candy." And I was like, "But don't you want to give me some kind of guideline for how to be perfect?" And she was like, "No, that's disordered."Virginia That’s the opposite of what we're doing now.Lindy  I find myself still searching for someone to tell me how to live so that I don't have to figure it out. Unfortunately, the answer is listening to your body and learning how to know yourself. So I'm doing that instead. VirginiaShe said joyfully.LindyAgain, I'm not trying to lose weight. I'm not on a weight loss journey. I think after so many years of living untreated in diet culture, I don't have any kind of a natural relationship with food. And it is a lot of work to figure out how to listen to my body. So even from a non-diet culture perspective, I was hoping that some part of this therapy was going to be her handing me a worksheet. Even if the worksheet said "One piece of cake for breakfast, one piece of cake for lunch, one piece of cake for dinner." I just was like, Making the choices is triggering to me.Virginia The decision fatigue! It's a lot of work, every meal. I have to, again, make the decision to eat and what to eat and how. All day long we do this??Lindy  I have to do the grocery shopping?Also, when you've been shamed your whole life for those choices, making the choices is stressful. Now I feel like, either direction, I'm doing something bad. I'm either doing diet culture by choosing to have a salad, even if I want one. I still am like, Am I betraying myself? Or the opposite, if I choose to eat something sort of indulgent or whatever, then I'm doing fat person. Which is fine.Virginia You have to negotiate it in both directions.Lindy  Yes! Except then I'm like, Well, but if I'm eating something decadent, is that just reactionary? Because I know I'm not supposed to do diet culture. So then do I even want this ice cream? I'm still, to this day, fairly lost. I'm way better than I was five years ago, and I've definitely figured some stuff out, which is just having routines. It's like, I have oatmeal. Done.Virginia One less decision.Lindy  In the morning, I have oatmeal, and then I have certain staple things I keep around. I'm so angry that my head has been messed with to this degree. You know what I mean? Virginia Yes. And you were trying to navigate recovery as a public fat person, which brings a whole other layer. I have had a tiny fraction of what you experience, and it's bananas. The amount the world feels like they can engage with our bodies and have opinions and theories and comments and all of that. You doing it, especially when you first started doing it, was such a gift to the rest of us. You were really on the front lines. Lindy  It's really hard, and that's the thing that I write about in the book. Obviously, the mean people are the worst. But there's a way that my fans feel an ownership over me that is a little bit ... not claustrophobic - I appreciate it, it's very loving - but also, I feel surveilled. I'm definitely being watched. People notice if my body changes, and that is confining in a certain way. It's hard to navigate, because you don't get to just have a private relationship with your body, which, to be fair, I voluntarily gave up because I said "I'm going to present my body for public conversation," basically.Virginia I don't know that we ever have informed consent around that though. I don't think you could have known when you decided to publish that first essay in The Stranger what this would be like. You know what I mean? I don't think you could wrap your head around where it would have gone.Lindy  I can't blame the fans, especially since so much of this stuff was grassroots on the Internet. I used to be a fat girl lurking on Tumblr, taking from other fat people who came before me. I don't want to build a wall around myself and say, "No, you can't look at me, and you can't feel anything about my body, and you can't have any opinions or connection to it," because I did the same thing. But navigating of it is hard, and complicated.Virginia It is complicated. I can understand, especially when navigating your own recovery and wanting to make choices for yourself, but feeling like people will feel let down. It's complicated. We all do it with other public figures all the time. Lindy  Oh, I don't like it when famous fat people lose weight. I don't trust it at all, but I don't say anything about it. You know what I mean?Virginia At least, not super publicly. Maybe in my own head.Lindy  Just to the group chat. "Oh, ozempic, got another one?" I'll send that text. I do have this fear that if eating disorder treatment and recovery did cause me to lose weight, because I changed my relationship with food in such a way that my body changes—which I don't know if that would happen or not, there's no way to know, probably not—but if it did happen, it's so scary to think that I could be perceived as having betrayed people, or that I'm one of those people that I look at and send to the group chat and say, "Oh boy." Which is why I shouldn't do that.Virginia Sure, fine. Now that you're putting it that way, I suppose.Lindy  It depends on the person. Look, just don't take me on your weight loss journey. I don't need to hear about your journey.Virginia That's really the key to me. People do what they do with their bodies, and that's fine, but I really appreciate it when a celebrity says nothing. If you start justifying and explaining it, odds are that you're causing harm to somebody.LindyIt's not that hard to not say anything.Virginia Yeah, just have your body. That's fine. You do you.Related to people dissecting your body online, another experience we unfortunately share is having our personal lives written about and commented on online, particularly in regards to marriage. In my case, my divorce. It made the Daily Mail, which is a real point of pride for me. You write really candidly about your marriage with Aham in this book and there are many difficult parts. Did it feel like you were taking some control back over the narrative to write about it? How do you feel about how people might react once they read what you've written?Lindy  I wanted to take control of the narrative. People react so intensely to non-monogamy. It's very scary to a lot of people, and I get it. You're sort of promised an equation for happiness, which is one person loving you obsessively for the rest of your life until you die. Just the idea that some people might choose a slight variation on that —it's threatening. And it's a slight variation. I am married to two people. It's just one extra person! There's just one extra. It's not really that different. If you think about it, being single is only one person away from being two people. Just one less.Virginia Right. Every single person is basically married. And every married person is basically in a throuple.Lindy  Is it that weird? People find it very weird. There was so much backlash, particularly directed at Aham, but also at me. My body was a big factor in it. The way that people perceive our relationship is never disconnected from the way people look at my body. So when people started to clock that we had a third person in our marriage—my partner, Roya. I shouldn't just talk about her like she's a mysterious, shadowy figure—so much of the response was, "Oh, we see what's going on here. You're fat and ugly and gross, so he doesn't like you. He needed a thin woman so that he can actually be happy."Virginia He had to trade up in some way. Lindy  He had to upgrade, as any man would, because, "Unfortunately, you're disgusting, and that's why we're here to defend you against this evil man."Virginia Yes, defend you —because this is from people who were your fans. That was what blew my mind [when you first came out]. I was like, But wait, you're a pro-Lindy person drawing these conclusions about her life. That doesn't make sense.LindyWhy are you being so mean to me?Virginia You're so mad on her behalf. But she didn't ask you to do that.Lindy  Right? And you know who's not saying anything mean to me? Aham. You guys are being way meaner. So, I don't know. It just felt like I wanted to get some definitive version down on paper, even though people are still going to do the same thing: take it and run with it, fill in the blanks. Everyone became a body language expert. People are obsessed with being the genius who read between the lines and could figure out what wasn't being said. We're in the age of conspiracy. I get it. But you can't actually just look at a picture of some people on the Internet and figure out what isn't being said. I couldn't even capture it in the book, because part of it is me and Aham sitting at the dining room table doing couples therapy over Zoom every week for three years. How do I put that in the book? It's so much work. People keep asking me, "Why are you so hard on yourself in this book?" Some people think I'm too easy on Aham. People keep telling me what my feelings are, and that I'm this naive person who's been duped. Or that I don't really understand, I can't really see, what's been done to me. I wanted to get my feelings down in hard copy. I can't excavate Aham’s feelings in my book. When I tried to, I cut it because it sounded like I'm begging the audience to co-sign that it was ok for me to stay, that I'm allowed to stay in my marriage. It feels like rationalization, and I don't want to do that. VirginiaYou don't actually need our permission. LindyI don't actually need anyone's permission. But what I can do, and what I have the authority and right to do, is put down in excruciating detail my process and the things that I came to realize about myself, and the ways that I had been a part of the toxicity in our marriage. The ways that I had been in denial, and the ways that I had not been taking care of myself, emotionally, psychologically and in a million different ways. That's what I have to work with. I'm also, in my personal life, a passive, shy person. I have this childhood wound of being talked over and not given the authority to speak on my own experiences, and not feeling capable of asserting myself. That's a lot of what this book is. I'm hard on myself because I found it fascinating. I found it so illuminating to realize all of these ways that my brain had been warped, and I thought it was rational. How interesting to come to a realization that these things that you thought were a given actually, maybe you were wrong. People read it as me being really cruel to myself, but to me, it felt really healing to excavate all those things and figure them out. I hope it's not a grind to read.Virginia No, it's definitely not. I found it more healing than you being hard on yourself. I mean, there are moments—and I think this is, you know, this is me being a fan for a moment—like we love you Lindy. We've been rooting for you for a long time. There are moments where I would think, Oh no, Lindy. I want to protect you. I don't like this. But then you would have this breathtaking insight about yourself, and I'd be like, Oh, shit. Ok, well, that makes sense. That was my experience of reading the book. These moments of feeling defensive or protective, and then being like, Oh, mind blown. Lindy  Thank you. I was just going to say, I do keep having this little feeling of, if you read the book and you're like, I can't relate to this because she's so hard on herself, well ... it sounds like you've never been fat.Virginia Or in therapy of any kind.Lindy  Congratulations on never having low self-esteem?Virginia Must be neat to always be so sure. Are you maybe a narcissist? A lot of what I saw in that narrative of "Lindy's the victim. He's trading up for the thin woman." is that this is so many fat women's core fear, right? So this was people projecting their own stuff of,  'This is what's going to happen to me. My husband's going to leave me for a younger, thinner woman.'Lindy  And that's rational, of course. That's what they do! I get it, because that was my fear. That's why I didn't want to do it. I was like, I know you're just waiting to upgrade. But in retrospect, it doesn't make sense. If what you were waiting to do was upgrade, why would you not just leave me? People talk to me as though, I'm still, to this day, being victimized. But to me, it was so healing to be brave and step through this veil into this other relationship structure and discover that Aham does not love me less. He didn't leave. I don't have less of him. He was telling the truth about, at least, how he feels about me. I was always so paranoid about that, and I always had so much doubt about it. People read it, and I get it, of course. Most people feel like they are barely holding their husband back from running off and being evil.Virginia But if that's the case, there is divorce. I just want to say to everyone in that box, there is this other path. You don't have to stay with that guy.Lindy  If you're worried about that, please get a divorce. You will love it. Virginia It's so great. It's real rad. Lindy  Look, I don't trust men either. I get it. I have the same wounds and the same anxieties. That's why I resisted so hard for so long. But I also didn't want to not be with Aham, because we have a really, really special relationship and I couldn't imagine ... I mean, I did eventually imagine, actually, there's a chapter cut from the book called "If I'd Left" about all the stuff I would have done. VirginiaOoh, I am intrigued. LindyI'll tell you about it, but mostly it was a list of the different animals that I would acquire. A big part of this whole journey—I've said "journey" so many times—Aham tried to do it right. He brought it up day one. He said, "This is non-negotiable if we're going to be together." I said, "Ok, sure." He tried to talk to me about it over the years. I avoided the conversation. I would throw a fit and cry and hyperventilate. I could not handle it. When I found out that he was seeing someone else, he said, "I think we want different things, and if that's the case, we need to not be together."🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Part 2 is for paid subscribers only. To hear the rest of our conversation with Lindy West, go to patreon.com/virginiasolesmith and join us. Membership starts at just $5 per month. You don't want to miss this the second part of this conversation.Join here for just $5 per monthJoin Just Toast!Thanks for listening to Burnt Toast. If you enjoyed the conversation, please support our work with a paid subscription. They start at just $5 a month, and you'll keep Burnt Toast an ad and sponsor free space. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/virginiasolesmith/join.Make sure you are following us for free in your podcast player. Scroll down wherever you're listening, tap the stars, five of them please, and leave us a review. That really helps us grow and helps new listeners find conversations like these.The Burnt Toast Podcast is hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. You can follow Virginia on Instagram at @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.bsky.social. You can follow Corinne on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay.bsky.social and on Patreon at Big Undies.This podcast is produced by Kim Baldwin. You can follow Kim at @theblondemule on all platforms and subscribe to her newsletter at The Blonde Mule.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Our video editor is Elizabeth Ayiku, who also runs the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders. Learn more and donate at melittlemefoundation.org.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You're listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith. Today my conversation is with the brilliant Savala Nolan. Savala is a writer, public speaker and professor at UC Berkeley. Her brand new book, Good Woman: A Reckoning is out now. Her first book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize and celebrated as a “standout collection” by the New York Times. Savala's writing has been featured in Vogue, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, NPR, TIME and more.I have a lot of conversations about bodies. I have a lot of conversations about gender. There is a lot that I thought I knew about race and bodies and gender in America. Reading Good Woman and talking to Savala blew my mind apart in ways that I'm still putting back together. This conversation is a must listen. This book is a must read.There was so much good stuff in this conversation, we are breaking it up into two episodes. Today in part one, we’re talking about bodies, race and gender. Part two will drop in two weeks, and that's when we're getting into sex, divorce and Savala’s classy and trashy butters. That conversation will be for paid subscribers only, so go to patreon.com/virginiasolesmith to join us. Membership starts at just $5 per month. You're not going to want to miss this one. One last thing! Trust me, you will want to read Good Woman after hearing this conversation. If you order it from my local independent bookstore, Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off if you have also ordered a copy of my book Fat Talk from them. Go to Split Rock Books and use the code "fat talk" at checkout. Here's Savala.If you enjoy this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work!Join Burnt Toast🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 235 TranscriptVirginia Why don't we just start by having you tell listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do?Savala  I'm a writer. I was thinking about this question quite a bit, actually, because my very first instinct is to say I'm a mom, which makes perfect sense. Motherhood is all consuming. But I thought I'll start with something that doesn't include my relationship with another human being, just in the interest of practicing my own wholeness. So, I'm a writer and a mom and a lawyer. I direct the social justice program at UC Berkeley's Law School, which is really a privilege and gives me a lot of hope, because I get to see hundreds of law students every day who want to change the world and make it better. I'm also a former dieter. Like a hardcore, former dieter, which is what initially brought me into your world and your work. I was put on my first diet when I was two or three, and rode those waves up and down until I was maybe 36 or 37, so I've got a few decades under my belt. I include that in my biography because that experience of going on and off diets for so long, and of being almost pre-verbal when I was indoctrinated into that world of dieting, informs a lot of what I do, including as a mom, including as a lawyer, including as a writer. Body liberation, gender and race, they fascinate me endlessly, how they play together and kind of co-create each other. Most of what I write about, and definitely what I write about in Good Woman, stems from that experience of dieting, and then breaking free from dieting in my thirties.Virginia  That is the best intro I think anyone's ever given themselves on the podcast. SavalaOh, stop. VirginiaNo, really. I love that you are like, 'Let me own this part of my story. This is the origin point. And then now let's get into the conversation.' That's fantastic. We are here to talk about your exquisite new book Good Woman: A Reckoning. It is a collection of 12 essays about what it means to be a woman. It's this incredible blend of memoir, reporting and history. I would love you to read us the first paragraph, just to set the stage for everything we're going to talk about.SavalaI'll just take a quick second to set it up a little bit.I'm trying to take a critical and very skeptical eye to all the ways that women and girls are socialized to be good. Almost from birth, right? In our particular culture, good means agreeable, quiet, serving of others, all the things that probably would pop into any woman's head when she hears the idea of a "good woman" or a "good girl." I'm trying to unpack and destroy some of that socialization in my own life, and think about what lies beyond it. To kick the book off, there's this very short essay that's sort of a manifesto. I think of it as a huge bell that rings to open the book. Here's the first paragraph.I refuse to be good. This is a matter of survival, not inclination or mood. I refuse to be easy and I refuse others preferences. I refuse to be amicable and I refuse to appease. I refuse to go along and I refuse to agree. I refuse to do what I was trained to do. Instead, I choose whatever lies beyond my social conditioning, even if I'm still looking for it, still spurring it into being. This is work of the mind, cerebral and tough. This is work of new language, new concepts, new intonations and my thinking must expand to fit the scale of all existence. It is also body work, work that is nailed to my flesh. It is gestating of new bones, an anointing of muscle and fat. It is passing through the stomatous black opening of my own cervix to the bright field, waiting on the other side in the wilderness. It is a lot to take on. But I welcome the challenge and the mystery and the darkness. It was in darkness that the universe was made. It is in darkness that each day is made new.Virginia  Thank you. That was incredible. Really, it was.SavalaThank you. Virginia  I loved how you opened the book because it encapsulates so many of the themes that you then go deeper in in every chapter. One of the biggest themes of refusal in the book is around the body. You write about how Black women's bodies in particular are constrained, controlled and made not their own. I really, really want people to read this because we don't have time to talk about all the history you go through and it's so well done. You trace this narrative from Sarah Baartman and Sally Hemings all the way to Nicki Minaj, connecting so many dots. It's really powerful. What has and what hasn't changed when it comes to how Blackness and fatness are policed for women?Savala  I love this question. We could probably write a doctoral thesis or dissertation on this question alone. So I'll just sort of share what comes to mind, a sort of smorgasbord of thoughts that come to mind when you ask this question. The first thing is, there's an overlap when we talk about Blackness and fatness in this culture. The very first point to make is that everything here is cultural. Not all cultures treat women's bodies, Blackness and fatness the way we do. That's the page on which everything else is written. It's interesting to me that when we talk about Blackness and fatness, the stereotypes overlap, right? Both fat people and Black people are viewed in this culture as out of control, lazy, kind of greedy, having a hyper appetite. Either being hyper-sexualized or de-sexualized. You either have the kind of va-va-voom, or the 'friend, never the leading lady' when it comes to fatness. With Blackness, it's the same thing. You either have the video vixen - this kind of hyper-sexual Black woman in a music video - or the mammy.It's interesting to me that the stereotypes overlap so much, and maybe the most powerful way they overlap is that they're both undesirable. They're both things in our culture that you should try to get away from if you can. You should try not to be too Black or too fat in our culture. So to me, as a woman who's fat and Black, it's kind of a one-two punch. They work together. The stereotypes overlapping tells you there's some relationship in our culture between these two things. And as you say, it goes way, way, way, way back in this country. It goes to chattel slavery, where Blackness and fatness started to be policed together and associated together, very literally. I talk about this in the book - there's a magazine called Godey's Lady's Book, which you might consider the Vogue or Good Housekeeping of today. Sort of fashion, but also home-y stuff. It was the biggest magazine in the antebellum country. And they talked all the time about how white women should stay thin or else they might start to be Black, like they might start to be looked on as if they're Black. There's another article from that magazine that says, "If a white woman gets fat, she might as well put herself in Black face."You can't see it if you're listening, but there's a lovely eye roll from Virginia. Our culture has long braided these things together. That's the history when you think about what hasn't changed. I think they are still braided together. When we think about what has changed, from my vantage point, there was maybe five or 10 years where it felt more ok to be fat, and more ok to be Black. It was the like ascendance of Lizzo, you know?VirginiaA brief shining moment. SavalaIt was a shining moment. There was also the George Floyd moment. There was a political reckoning with Blackness that was refreshing. I guess maybe it wasn't even five years. It was a brief window. Now it feels like we're in a backlash. It feels a little bit like the more things change, the more they stay the same. We had this moment of a collective leap towards something like liberation. Because of politics and because of the capitalistic nature of the pharmaceutical industry in this country and GLP-1s being so, for now anyway, profitable, we're seeing a real backlash to both fatness and Blackness. That lands on women really hard, because of how women are tied to our bodies in this culture in a particular way. So I guess I would say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The silver lining being that because we did have these few years of something like enlightenment, the first sun rays coming over the mountain, there are a lot of people who have a much higher capacity to talk about what our culture does to fatness and Blackness than there were 20 years ago, right? So that's a silver lining, I think. VirginiaYes, I agree with that.We see these moments of women claiming their bodies and claiming control over their bodies, and then facing tremendous backlash. You talk about the Nicki Minaj album cover that she was taken to task for being too sexual, too graphic, etc.. She was like, 'It's my body.' Savala  'It’s my body.' Also, it's no worse than a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and everybody likes those. VirginiaYes, they sure do. But those are skinny white lady bodies. SavalaThose are skinny white ladies, not voluptuous Black women.Virginia  There are these moments where we have the conversation. Whereas if she hadn't had the album cover, we wouldn't have had the conversation. But I'm with you on how it's not enough. The backlash feels so brutal right now. But I do hang on to those moments.Savala  I do, as well. The comfort of a backlash is that you know you were doing something right. You can't make a quilt with one stitch. You have to put a lot of stitches in. So we have to keep stitching as far as our own liberation goes. The backlashes will come periodically, the tide comes in and out, you just try to keep inching it forward. I'm hopeful that we will continue, ultimately, to do that.Virginia  And keep reminding people where we've been. I really appreciated your post on Instagram this week. There's been so much talk about ICE as the gestapo and you were like, 'Guys, it's not the gestapo, it's slave patrols.' It's our own country. It's our own history that's coming up again here. I should note for listeners, you're hearing this in March, but we recording this at the end of January, right after all of the violence and murders in Minneapolis. Savala  I understand the urge to look to other countries and the violence in other places, and it's gestapo-like, you know. It's certainly fair to think about a comparison. But to completely ignore the fact that we actually invented this stuff.Virginia  That the gestapo guys learned it from us.SavalaOne hundred percent. Exactly.VirginiaThey've been watching what America was doing.Savala  Yes, and it's sad to own it, but it's a necessary step, and managing it and moving beyond it is to hold it close and see that it's our own stuff. It's like an individual who wants to grow and improve. They have to own their shit. 'Oh, this is my shit. I have to work on it.' It's the same. It's just at the level of culture.Virginia  As a country, we have to own our shit, and some of us are doing more of that than others. Well, on the level of the individual, you write a lot in the book about growing up as a fat little girl, being put on diets so heartbreakingly early and then continuing to pursue thinness throughout college and early adulthood. Now that you're on the other side of that, you write about how abandoning the pursuit of thinness feels like becoming a non-woman. I really was interested in this idea of the non-woman. I would love to talk about that a little.SavalaThere's a quote I love from a scholar, Sander Gilman, who studies fatness and gender. You might know this quote Virginia, some of your listeners might, too. He writes that dieting is a way that women show they understand their role in society. Part of the way that women remain and become legible in our culture is by practicing and performing privately and publicly dissatisfaction with their bodies and the pursuit of a better body, which generally means a thinner body, a more toned body, or a "healthier body."When you do those things as a woman, people get it. They understand you. They don't have to make any inferences. They don't have to wonder what you're doing. It's instantly obvious. When I talk about how much people rely on that sort of vocabulary to understand women. When I talk publicly at schools about this, one of the first things I do in my talks is post a before and after photo without the words "before" and "after." I ask people to raise their hands if they know what it is. The room could have 300 people in it and everybody raises their hands. They know exactly what they're seeing. That's what I mean when I say that the performance of dieting, or body improvement, or body shame, publicly and also privately, makes you readable as a woman to the culture. People can literally read it instantly, the way you can read a stop sign. When you stop doing that, when you stop dieting, exercising in ways that are meant to control the shape of your body, the weight of your body, all that stuff. When you stop using that vocabulary to bond with other women, when you stop policing what other people eat. When you stop doing those things, people don't get it. There's some level on which you're no longer performing the role of a woman. That's what I mean when I say that you become a non-woman. You become this other entity, that, let's be clear, exists in other cultures. It has existed in this culture to some extent, in various pockets of it, but that's what I mean. You step outside of the mold, and then people aren't quite sure what to do with you. Can I give a quick example? VirginiaYeah, please. SavalaI work with a fabulous team of people I love and adore at UC Berkeley. One of them had a birthday, so to celebrate, I brought in a box of fabulous French pastries. We have a little birthday party and we invite lots of people to come by and pick something up if they want to. Every single person, every person, who came in the room said something, and they all happen to be women, something like, 'Ooh, I worked out this morning. That's how I that's how I earned this.' Some version of, 'Oh, God, I shouldn't. I had a bagel for breakfast,' or, 'I'm gonna cut it in half because I think I'm gonna have a big dinner tonight.' I was the only one who didn't. At some point I said, "Come on, guys. Let's just let the food be food. We don't have to earn our food here."Virginia  You don’t actually have to publicly perform. Savala  You could have heard a pin drop, Virginia. VirginiaOh, I'm sure.SavalaIt was like I said something in a different language. People don't know how to read the moment anymore. They don't know how to read me anymore. It's so disruptive. So that's what I mean about becoming the non-woman. In that essay, I then go on to talk about the joy of being a non-woman. I don't mean this in the sense of gender identity, I mean it in a more metaphorical, philosophical way. I very much identify as a woman.Virginia  Right, but you're rejecting these expectations and this narrow definition of womanhood.Savala  One hundred percent. It's a little experiment. If listeners want to try that, I'm sure most of your listeners are already at least one foot in the door of not dieting anymore, but if they want to try performing something else and seeing how they become no longer instantly readable in the space, they'll know what I mean.Virginia  It's interesting because it's about how you simultaneously become more visible because you're doing this uncomfortable thing no one knows what to do with, and you're rendering yourself more invisible because you're no longer saying Yes, you can identify me as a sex object. Yes, you can identify me as young and thin and pretty and all the you know. So then it's like, 'Oh, we don't know what to do with her.'Savala  Totally. It's a spotlight. It's like, what's that? There's some rubbernecking that happens and you can be in the mood to deal with it or not. It's not like I always will say something when I'm around little pockets of diet culture. But in that moment, there were 12 or 15 people who came through and it was every single one. Virginia  Can we not just eat the pastries?Savala  Yeah. And if you don't want one for whatever reason, that's ok. Virginia  Don't tell us why. Just don't eat it. It's fine.Well, that's a great example too, because that's also the kind of modeling that I'm sure you're conscious of doing in front of your kiddo. There's a line in the book I really loved where you write:My child is my child, carrier of my histories, and I worry she'll be particularly vulnerable to dieting. In order to fortify her, I build a home life free from diet culture. This is, of course, a huge focus of my work. It's why I wrote Fat Talk.SavalaIt's the bread and butter, if you will.Virginia  It is the bread, yes. We'll get to the butter, but it's definitely the foundation of Burnt Toast. Deliberately, I'm more likely to say, 'Let's just eat the cake,' or 'Eat the dessert' when I know my kids are listening, because I've got to model the other way. I've got to model the non-woman for them.I would love to know what are some of the little things you do to get the anti-diet, parenting stuff in?Savala  Well, the number one thing, and this will be very familiar to the Burnt Toast crew, is I, myself don't diet. That's number one. I don't pursue intentional weight loss, and I haven't since my daughter was about six months old. That was breaking point when I started to look for a different kind of life. Not only do I not diet or pursue intentional weight loss, I never, not once, have ever spoken ill of my body or complained about my body in front of my daughter. It's funny when you're raising a girl because on the one hand, I want my daughter to feel beautiful and I want to speak a sense of beauty into her. "Oh, you're so beautiful." And I want to talk about myself through the lens of beauty for that reason, too. On the other hand, you don't want to over emphasize beauty and teach them that that is a super meaningful currency that they have to ... you know what I mean? Virginia  It's like, 'You are beautiful and it's the least interesting thing about you.' You're holding both of those with both hands all the time.Savala  All the time. So I speak well of my body, but try not to do it in a way that feels too "cover of a magazine" oriented. There are other little things like, we decant food in our house so most of it is not associated with "nutrition information."And we talk about nutrition information, because she picks it up in the world. But in our house, it's just in the container. I make a point of letting her choose how much she eats. I tend to take on the responsibility of picking what's on offer, and then she chooses how much. But we've mix that up as she's gotten older.I fill my home with physical media, like figurines, statues, posters, books that have all kinds of bodies, especially fat bodies, because I want that to feel normal and celebrated for her. I want her to see fat bodies depicted as beautiful, wonderful things, not just as things we try to move away from or punish. It's good for me, too. Almost anything that I practice for myself, I practice for her, in an age appropriate way. Including being really playful. It doesn't all have to be political. I talk in the book about this one episode where my daughter was probably about four or five years old, and she wanted some chocolate chips after she had already had dessert. Initially, I was like, "No, you had your ice cream. We'll have chocolate chips another time." And then I was like, I want some chocolate chips. I said, "Actually, yeah, let's have some chocolate chips." We each had a little handful, and she said, "I wish I could have more." And I was like, "I think one is enough." And then I was like, "Actually, let's have more." And we sort of did that playfully a few times. She still loves it. She remembers it was such joy. My goal there was to have a little fun, but also to celebrate appetite, and take this moment that we often are taught to read as personal failure - going back for a little more - and change it into something that was fun and goofy and totally fine.Virginia  Celebrating pleasure. Yeah, let's have more. It tastes good tonight. Let's do it and not feel like we have to put guardrails around that.Savala  Exactly. I look for moments like that, and I'll say, who knows what the future brings, but my kid has a really joyful, non self-conscious relationship with food that involves eating all kinds of things, including broccoli and kale, and with her body. Who knows what the world brings? Well, we do know what the world brings. We know what's coming, but she has a foundation that's much better than mine was.Virginia  Yeah, such a different foundation than what you had. And that has to do something. I have to believe that.Savala  Yeah, it has to. It has to. And I must say, obviously, your book inspired me and was part of my inspiration in how I approached feeding my kiddo.Virginia  I'm so glad it's helpful. Yeah, I mean, it's always a work in progress, but it is really rewarding when you see kids having that ease and not overthinking and not getting caught in those in those traps that we do. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterEditor's note: We're splitting Savala's interview into two episodes, so tune in to part two on March 19 to hear Savala's "classy and trashy" butters. Part two will be for paid subscribers only, so go to patreon.com/virginiasolesmith to join us. Membership starts at just $5 per month. You're not going to want to miss this the second part of this conversation.Join here for just $5 per monthJoin Just Toast!🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈VirginiaAll right. Well, this was an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for being here. Just tell folks where we find you and how we support your work.SavalaOh, it's been a serious joy to be here. I could do it all again. The best way to support my work is, of course, to buy Good Woman: A Reckoning and share it with the women in your life that you love, and maybe even the the men in your life that you love.VirginiaI agree with that. SavalaIf you can't buy it, you can get it at libraries, or borrow it from a friend. Obviously, as an author, I'm interested in book sales, but mostly I'm interested in the ideas in the book doing good in the world. So read Good Woman. If people want to hang out a little bit, I'm on Instagram at savalanolan. SavalaNolan.com is my website, which is another way to get in touch with me. I totally welcome that. I love doing book clubs, talking to readers, all that stuff, so if folks are interested, they should reach out.Virginia  Thank you, Savala. This was such a joy.SavalaThank you, Virginia. The pleasure was mine.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Thanks for listening to Burnt Toast. If you enjoyed the conversation, please support our work with a paid subscription. They start at just $5 a month, and you'll keep Burnt Toast an ad and sponsor free space. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/virginiasolesmith/join.Make sure you are following us for free in your podcast player. Scroll down wherever you're listening, tap the stars, five of them please, and leave us a review. That really helps us grow and helps new listeners find conversations like these.The Burnt Toast Podcast is hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. You can follow Virginia on Instagram at @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.bsky.social. You can follow Corinne on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay.bsky.social and on Patreon at Big Undies.This podcast is produced by Kim Baldwin. You can follow Kim at @theblondemule on all platforms and subscribe to her newsletter at The Blonde Mule.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Our video editor is Elizabeth Ayiku, who also runs the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders. Learn more and donate at melittlemefoundation.org.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay and it’s time for your February Indulgence Gospel!Today we are talking about influencers who show their expensive influencer grocery hauls, as well as people who spend A LOT OF MONEY on food delivery. (If you too had feelings about that ChrisLovesJulia reel...let's get into it!) We also talk about our own spending on groceries and food delivery....and our complicated feelings about both. 🥴You do need to be a paid Just Toast subscriber to listen to this full conversation. Membership starts at just $5 per month!Join Just Toast!🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈

You're listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.Today our conversation is with Kim Baldwin, the newest member of the Burnt Toast team.Kim is the former digital editor for the Nashville Scene. Her culture writing can be found in places like the Nashville Scene, Parnassus Books’ Musings and on her Substack. Kim has interviewed folks like Sarah Sherman, Trixie Mattel, John Waters, Samantha Irby and Tess Holliday.Originally a blogger, Kim started The Blonde Mule in 2006 and later turned her popular interview series “These My Bitches” into a podcast called Ladyland. Kim writes a weekly newsletter about books and pop culture, teaches social media classes and is a frequent conversation partner for author events in Nashville.If you enjoy this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work!Join Burnt Toast🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 233 TranscriptVirginiaWe have a very fun episode for you today. We are introducing to all the Burnt Toasties, many of whom may already know and love her, our new podcast producer Kim Baldwin. KimHi, hi, hi. VirginiaWe are really happy you're here. Kim is doing a lot of things to improve our workflow. Yesterday she taught Corinne and me how to use Slack. Corinne, I think you already knew how to use Slack, but I sure did not. So that was exciting.Kim is joining us not just to teach us Slack, but to help with podcast production and make everything run more smoothly and efficiently. We are really grateful to her and thought it would be fun to do an episode where you get to know her.Kim  I'm excited to be on the Burnt Toast team, and excited to be here today despite harrowing conditions. VirginiaTruly harrowing.KimI'm coming to you live from a public library because my home does not have water or internet.Virginia  Yes, Kim is surviving the Nashville ice apocalypse, where, what 130,000 people have been displaced?Kim230,000.Virginia230,000 people have been displaced. So she has been heroically working on Burnt Toast while literally being out of her home, back in her home, but now working from the library. Yay, public libraries! We love you. Let's dive in. Corinne, why don't we take turns asking our questions?Corinne  My first question is, what is your fat radicalization story? How did you get interested in body liberation work?Kim  When I turned 40 I had to get a biometric screening for health insurance because over 40, you have to qualify for insurance. It was a really stigmatizing appointment. In hindsight, it was traumatic. My therapist was like, Enough. You have to go see someone now. That was 2018. I started working with an anti-diet registered dietitian. I thought I was going for one or two appointments, just for someone to say, "It's fine, you're all good." It became evident I had a disordered relationship, primarily with exercise, but also with eating. I went into what I now call recovery. It wasn't called that in real-time. It was just a chill, "Well, why don't you come see me every week for a while?"So I did that. I worked with Katherine Fowler, a non-diet, registered dietitian nutritionist here in Nashville. She's great. I knew nothing before her. She introduced me to anti-diet and Health at Every Size. She gave me a bunch of resources, one of which was Christy Harrison and Food Psych. I went whole hog. I listened to the back catalog of Food Psych, I read a bunch of books. I think Christy's first book came out around that time. It was so radical to me to think, Hold on, I can be fat, or, Hold on, I don't have to exercise this much. I was an Iron Man, so I was at that level of exercise.Virginia  Oh wow. Oh gosh, that's aggressive.Kim  When you exercise that much, for me, restrictive eating is just part of it. They really do go hand in hand. You control your food to try to control your outcomes and races and stuff. That's a long answer: back in 2018 I started working with registered dietitian, and she blew my mind and saved my life.Virginia  That's amazing. Yay, registered dietitians who do that work! Also, yay, Food Psych! That was a great podcast. Corinne, wasn't it one of your entry points, too? I feel like we've talked about this.Corinne  Yeah. I was a regular listener.Virginia  Just hearing people's stories over and over. The way Christy structured that was so healing and valuable for so many people.I've always been a fan of your culture writing. You always have amazing book recs, movie recs. Your newsletter The Blonde Mule is definitely one of my go to's for like, Ooh, what culture am I missing out on? Kim will know. So I would love to know who are some of your fat culture inspirations, icons, or just people you really love in that space?Kim  For sure Aubrey Gordon. She was an original, and back then, she was anonymous. Her Instagram posts back in the day - she still sometimes reposts those old ones in her stories. She still means so much to me. I learned about her early on. And then, of course, Lindy West. I had read Shrill, and because I worked at an alt-weekly, she also worked at The Stranger in Seattle, which is their alt-weekly, and we had similar jobs, so I looked up to her. She had this great essay in The Stranger where she came out as fat. In real time, I wasn't there yet, but when I got into recovery and started learning, I realized how ahead of her time - ahead of all of us - she was. And then, Virginia, you and people I found through Food Psych and through Christy. Back then we were all still using social media with wild abandon. You could learn about people through Instagram stories. Christy Harrison would repost all these people to her Instagram stories and I would click through and follow who she reposted. She'd repost something of yours, or, I can't even remember all the people back then. Oh, Ragen Chastain. I've been reading her stuff this whole time. I hope everyone reads her and knows what amazing work she's doing in this space. I can't get a sense of how many people know how much she's doing.Virginia  She does such deep dives into the research. She really is someone who is taking the time to take apart scientific papers, look at the methodology, look a what bias went into the research. I have learned so much from Ragen. I started following her back in probably the early 2000s when she was writing about being a fat dancer. I remember I interviewed her for a woman's magazine.KimOh right. I forgot about that, her original handle.VirginiaDances With Fat. Oh, you're making me nostalgic for this time. Now everyone's like, Body positivity is dead, and it was never really good, but there were these really good folks doing great work in the mix. Kim  There was an organic way to find, I don't want to say community in the way we say it now, but I didn't know anybody in real life going through what I was going through, or who was learning what I was learning. All I had, truly, was Food Psych. So if someone was on Food Psych, I would look them up. I would follow them. And then that reposting thing, that's how I found so many people.Virginia  Yeah, it's so true.Corinne  Kim, where does the name The Blonde Mule come from? Kim  Oh, this question.CorinneIf you want to skip it ...KimIt brings up a lot of embarrassment. I should address it. VirginiaIt's time. Kim, it's time. I don't know the backstory.KimIn 2006 I started a personal blog on blogspot because everyone was doing it. Back then it was the thing to have a cutesy name. No one used their government name online back then. Your email wasn't your name, your blog - none of that was your name. I'm a Taurus and I am actually stubborn, so "the mule" was kind of a nickname. There was this formula of a physical descriptor plus a nickname. All my friends had a version of this. I thought, Oh, I'll just do the blonde mule. I'll change it later, nobody cares. No one followed me. Then I had to buy my domain name and get handles on social media sites. So 2006 to 2026, how many years is that? Is that 20 years? So unfortunately, I'm locked in. Because now I own that name. I don't love it because I wish I hadn't self identified with my hair color. Especially because it's blonde and that means a lot of things that don't align with my values. Also, during the pandemic, I quit coloring my hair and so I'm not really blonde anymore.Virginia  A blonde-ish mule.Corinne  I would consider you blonde. Virginia  I still would consider you blonde. CorinneAlso Virginia, aren't you also a Taurus?VirginiaI am also a Taurus. I am also pretty stubborn.CorinneThis is an earth sign podcast. I'm a Capricorn.KimJohn, my husband, is a Capricorn.Virginia  I don't know what that means. KimWe're very compatible.Corinne  Yes, I also have a Taurus Moon.Virginia  Sure. I've been meaning to get one of those. I don't understand astrology. But I do relate to picking a name and sticking with it because now you're stuck with it. In many ways that is the backstory of Burnt Toast. So relatable. I named it on a whim. People are always like, What's that about? And I'm like, I mean, not a lot. But it is what it is. The Blonde Mule is sticky. It sticks with you.Kim  There are people who make me feel better. One is Samantha Irby because she is still bitches gotta eat. She also is from, like, 2006. There are a few of us that are locked in. What are you going to do? I literally bought this name.Virginia  I'm stuck with it. You might as well own it, for sure. Another part of your work life is that you work at the famous Parnassus Books, owned by best-selling author and icon Ann Patchett. I am a former bookstore girl. I love bookstores. Most authors, we love bookstores. So I really love talking about bookstores. I want to know, what's the most fun part of bookstore life? Also, does this bookstore have any pets?Kim  The bookstore has so many pets. We have shop dogs. Ann famously has a dog, Nemo. He appears in most of the videos. Before Nemo she had a cute little guy named Sparky, who I loved so much. There's a back office staff and they almost all have dogs and bring their dogs to work. VirginiaLove this. KimThere's one bookseller who has a dog, but she's on maternity leave, so we're a little bit short on dogs that are out on the floor, but in the back office, it's dog central. This is my second time working there. I worked there in 2019. I've mostly been self-employed and worked from home for a really long time. My mood was starting to get dark and my therapist suggested it would be nice to have some socialization and to leave my house one or two days a week. I was friendly with Parnassus, so I asked, "Is this a thing?" And they were excited, so they hired me to be a part-time bookseller back in 2019. Then the pandemic hit and they closed for a long time and it just didn't make sense anymore. I went and did a whole other job for a few years and left that job last year and went back to the bookstore. Same thing. I still work from home and I work at the bookstore one or two days a week. I do actually love a million things about it, but my favorite thing this round is everyone I work with is 24 years old, give or take. I love them so much. It is so invigorating to be around a whole staff of 24 year olds. They all love their parents. They have really good parents. They're mostly queer, which makes it extra nice that none of their parents were bad. Their parents are super accepting. They're all really smart and they're all funny. The things that are funny to them are so strange. There are all these long running jokes about, like, which Muppet are you? That's a fun thing for Gen Z.Virginia  That sounds delightful. I mean, I think bookstore people are just the best people and the most charming weirdos. And I love hearing that 24 year olds love their parents. Because even though my oldest kid is 12, and we have a ways to go, fingers crossed we'll get there.Kim  Yeah. Our generation, not so much.Virginia  It's not a given. Let's put it that way. It's not a given.We're going to do a lightning round of fun, goofy questions so we can all get to know you better. Corinne, why don't you kick it off?Corinne  All right, first question. Tell us about your pets.Kim  Ooh, I have two official pets. I have two cats. They came in at different times. They're both street cats. One is Nomi. He's kind of a Siamese cat. The other one is your regular striped street cat. His name is Benny.VirginiaAnd you have an owl in your backyard. KimI have an owl. I live in the country, so we have deer, turkey, owls, hawks, a skunk and a lot of snakes.Virginia  Nice. Favorite hobbies? I know from Instagram you are into collage making and you are into puzzles and I'm here for both of them.Kim  Yes, you are part of my puzzle journey. I knew that you got that table and you were doing them, and I thought, Ooh, that seems relaxing. We moved into this house last year, and I thought, Who am I going to be in the country? I'm going to be someone who does puzzles, and I'm going to get a puzzle table. And I did.Virginia  It's so relaxing. The best.Kim  The collage thing is new. I went to a divorce party and we were doing blackout poetry collages. I had never heard of any of this. I had the time of my life and my friend was like, You can just do this at home. And so now I do.Virginia  Corinne was nodding because Corinne is cooler and of course she knows what black out poetry collages are. I do not. CorinneI think you do, as well. VirginiaIs it like what Kate Baer writes? Like blacked out words? Okay, that is cool. I love that.Corinne  Kim, tell us your favorite comfort food or snacks.Kim  I've needed a lot of comfort this week. My go-to is chicken tenders and mashed potatoes. You do need carbs when you're this stressed out because your body's trying to slow you down and get you to rest and sleep. So there's been a lot of tendies in my life.Corinne  Are these from a specific restaurant? Or the freezer section?Kim  This week they're from a grocery store. There's a proliferation of chicken stuff here - the Nashville hot chicken. Truly, everywhere you go, there's hot chicken and there's tenders. The driving force of Nashville is chicken tenders.CorinneSounds like heaven.VirginiaBurnt Toast retreat in Nashville?? We just eat chicken tenders for three days? Start planning it now. That sounds great. Favorite thing you wore recently, and what makes it your favorite?Kim  Let's talk about jeans. I don't know what we're supposed to be wearing anymore. I am still comfortable in skinny jeans. VirginiaIt's okay. This is a jeans safe space.KimI'm locked and loaded in those high-rise, skinny jeans. But that is not what we're supposed to be wearing anymore.Virginia  They're real mad at us for still wanting to wear them.Kim  Let me tell you what the people I work with wear. It looks like I work with the Insane Clown Posse. They are wearing jeans so big and baggy it blows my mind. So I thought, Let me try. I bought a pair of - everything comes from Big Undies - I bought these Old Navy barrel jeans and I feel nuts in them. But I wore them to work and everyone was like, That's what you're supposed to look like! I've never been more uncomfortable in my life than when I wear these jeans. Corinne  You realize you're going to have to send us photos, right? We're going to be texting your co-workers to take secret photos of you. KimOh, my God.Virginia  We're going to need a photo.Kim  I went to a museum recently and wore those Old Navy barrel jeans - light wash, I will add - very uncomfortable.Virginia  You went right into the deep end of that swimming pool.Kim  I went in. And then I have this Universal Standard shirtdress. They have them in white and black. It's just a button up, floor length thing. I wore that, obviously unbuttoned from the waist down, and then I have those Crocs Dylan platform clogs.Corinne  My God, this is very chic outfit. KimI have the ones that are like clown shoes.CorinneThey're platform Crocs. Kim  I wore that to the museum and I think it's the coolest I've ever looked, but it's the most uncomfortable I've ever been in my life.Virginia  So cool though.Corinne  Dying to see it. KimIt's my only outfit. Everything else is workout clothes.Virginia  You have one outfit. You're set. I mean, jeans are a whole conversation. That silhouette and changing from how we've been programmed, I feel you. But even wearing something where you're like, I know this is cool, but it feels so different from what I like. The way the trends have changed. I do feel like that is one of the oddest things about getting older - suddenly realizing the clothes are so unfamiliar. Corinne is the baby of the podcast, so she might not be able to relate to that.Corinne  Kim, how old are you?KimI'm 49. I turn 50 this year.Virginia  Ooh, exciting. When's your birthday? KimIt’s a whole thing. I'm working through it.Corinne  Wait, what if you guys have the same birthday?Kim  I'm May 20. VirginiaI'm April 30. KimOh, you're an April Taurus.Virginia  And that means a thing?I feel that it is a whole thing about clothes. You're just like, It's making less and less sense. I'm trying, but I don't know.Kim  It's hard. I think we're just supposed to feel stupid.Corinne  Well, not to change the subject, but how do you feel about brownies? Are you an edge, corner or center of the pan person? KimCenter. I can't deal with the edges.Virginia  Same. KimIt needs to all be the same texture.Virginia  You've got to pair up with your edge people so that you can get the brownies you want.Corinne  Following up that groundbreaking question, peanut butter in the fridge or pantry?Kim  Pantry. I didn't know anyone put it in the fridge. But during the storm, we stayed at a hotel for eight days, and then we moved into someone's empty house, and they had their peanut butter in the fridge. I was like, are we supposed to be doing this?Virginia  Yes, that's what the Lord intended. I am.Corinne  I am also a fridge peanut butter person.KimAre you supposed to?Virginia  Not from a food safety perspective, but it spiritually feels correct to me. It feels like it should be cold. I threw this in here because it was a recent poll on Burnt Toast and the people were against me on this. CorinneOh, wow. VirginiaWhen my boyfriend moved in, he was like, Why is the peanut butter in the fridge? What's happening? You're insane. And I was like, well, let's check with the public, assuming that my Burnt Toasties would rally around me. Instead they were all like, What are you doing? Corinne  The only open stuff in my pantry is crackers and cookies. Open stuff goes in the fridge. VirginiaIf it has a lid, it needs to be cold.KimBut what about hot sauce?CorinneFridge.Virginia  Yeah, in the fridge.KimWe do, too. But I have started to think i'm not supposed to because, at restaurants, it's just on the table. CorinneThis is true. Virginia  You have a good point. I'm not saying it's correct, but I'm saying it's correct. Another favorite Burnt Toast question that a reader submitted that we think is very fun to ask people is, which liquids would you want shooting out of your fingers? If you could have fingers that shoot liquids.Corinne  Each finger can be a separate liquid.Virginia  But also, if you don't want to think of five, it's fine. If you're like, I just want a Coke finger. That's all I need.Corinne  It could also be a liquid that's not something you drink.Kim  Like what?CorinneGasoline. That's my new best answer. I would want gas to be able to shoot out of my finger.Kim  I did just had to buy a generator. I hope this episode doesn't give me PTSD when I listen to it in a month and remember how traumatized I am from the storm. I'll be like, Why did I keep mentioning generators and hotels? Ok, I think it would be iced coffee, like a cold brew; Pamplemousse La Croix; honestly, orange juice. Love orange juice. Love an acid. That's it. Those are my three. I'm not a soft drink person.Corinne  Well, are you an electrolyte person?Kim  Oh, my God. I've been dying to talk to you about this. No, they're fake science, Corinne.Corinne  Well, fake science works for me.KimNo, I'm not. I used to be.Corinne  Talk to me when you come to high elevation.Kim  You know what? Honestly, that's fair. I have been in your part of the country a lot the last few years. We have to go to L.A. a few times a year. During COVID we couldn't fly, so we started driving, and now we are obsessed with driving cross-country.Corinne  Oh, wow. We really should talk.Kim  I didn't know you yet, but the last time we were in Albuquerque I told Virginia I wanted your phone number to ask you where to get a breakfast burrito. CorinneOh, my God! Yeah, you should have!Virginia  Corinne always has that intel.Kim  But no, the high altitude, that's legit.Virginia  I'm excited to have another electrolyte skeptic in the podcast. That's going to be helpful for me.Virginia  The beverage I will never be needing less of is Diet Coke. Are you pro or con Diet Coke, and if you are not pro Diet Coke, what do you drink?Kim  I'm pro Diet Coke, especially with pizza. I drink one on the days I'm at the bookstore. I just need one halfway through to keep going. I do love Diet Coke. I just wake up and drink coffee. That's typically it for the day, but if I'm out to eat or if I'm at work, I drink a Diet Coke. VirginiaYeah, it's a nice little treat.Corinne  I just learned that there's a difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero.Virginia  Obviously! There's a huge difference!CorinneBut what is it? No one can really articulate it.VirginiaThe taste.Corinne  But why are they making two zero calorie Cokes?Virginia  Diet culture.Kim  I think it's gender. I think they think women want Diet Coke and men do not.Virginia  Men are drinking a manly Coke Zero? That doesn’t sound more masculine.Corinne  But what is the difference? Is it different sweeteners?Virginia  I am Googling it to get to the bottom of this. "Coke Zero aims to replicate the classic Coke taste using a blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium." Diet Coke uses only aspartame.Corinne  So it is the sweeteners. They both have caffeine?Virginia  They both have caffeine. They both are calorie-free and sugar-free. Diet Coke is where you want to go for that pure aspartame hit, which is what I'm looking for. Corinne  Speaking of Diet Coke, any other diet-y foods or habits that you've reclaimed?Kim  Recently, I've started eating Uncrustables, which I hadn't had for a long time. When I was doing Iron Man training, that was what you'd take on a long bike ride. So I've associated that with needing to refuel during workouts. But I've started eating them again.Virginia  They're so good. A great purse snack. I like to have one for errand running.Kim  I've also started doing that. I just throw them in there. They're great because the purse thaws it out.Virginia  Yes, exactly. I put it between my sunglasses case and my wallet. It gets nice and toasty.Kim  And honestly? Yogurt. I quit eating yogurt for a long time, but it turns out you can have yogurt for fun.CorinneYogurt is good.Virginia  Especially if you can have the full fat yogurt.KimOh, my God. Game changer. I bought it on accident because they were out of the one I buy. I was like, Oh, it never occurred to me to switch.Virginia  The one thing RFK, Jr. and I agree on is full fat yogurt. The one overlap in our otherwise completely disparate Venn diagram circles.KimThat disgusting, broken clock of a man.Virginia  Any diet-y foods or habits that you'll never touch again that you're like, Nope, that ship has sailed?Kim   Turkey bacon and turkey sausage. VirginiaLet that go. Just, why?KimI'm just going to eat pork if I'm going to eat pork. Oh, Lean Cuisine. Never bringing that back. All kinds of snacks. I could never eat a pretzel again for the rest of my life.Corinne  Oh, wow. I love pretzels.Kim  Or unbuttered popcorn. All those zero point foods.Virginia  The ones that I hear people fully reclaim are cottage cheese, but again, pivoting to full fat cottage cheese. Rice cakes surprisingly have a lot of devotees. That's one where I'm like, No thanks. People like the crunch. I don't know.Kim  The exercise stuff I remember more. All of that has just gone away. Corinne  Never going to do another Iron Man? KimNo, I am not. I just take little walks.Virginia  So much better.Corinne  Do you have any current favorite TV shows?Kim  Oh, my God. My favorite topic is television!I am watching The Wire for the first time. I watched season one and I'm obsessed with it. I'm going to start season two as soon as I have internet in my house again. I am a middle-aged white woman, so I love RuPaul's Drag Race. I am its main demographic. I'm watching that right now. There's a new season. And I'm watching The Pitt.Virginia  I can't watch The Pitt because of medical trauma, but I do think I would like it. I need a website that gives me spoilers, so I can pick and choose which episodes, then I can do it.Corinne  Our last question is what are you reading right now?Kim  Ooh, I'm reading Lindy West's next memoir that's about to come out in March. It's called Adult Braces.Virginia  🎉 Spoiler, but Kim did get Lindy to come on the pod soon. So get excited, folks!Kim  I've read all of her books. I think this is her fourth book and second memoir. Man, it's blowing me away. I love her writing, and this is beyond anything she's written before, not to disparage her other books, but this is a whole new level of vulnerability. It's so good. I'm reading Heated Rivalry, also. CorinneOh, fun!Virginia  I have both of those on tap to start as soon as I finish what I'm reading right now. I can't wait to read Lindy, and I can't wait to read the Heated Rivalry books, which I ordered from your friend's bookstore, Tropes & Trifles. Kim  That's awesome. My friend Lauren owns that bookstore. She's great. Her bookstore is great.Virginia  It felt like a really good way to support Minnesota, and also my own need for more gay hockey after Corinne got me into Heated Rivalry.Corinne  Finally! It took so long. Virginia  It did. People were so mad.KimIt took longer than it needed to.VirginiaI know. I just missed it somehow. And then I was like, Okay, I'm here. I get it.Kim  I'm in a romance group chat. One of the people in the group chat is Lauren, who owns Tropes & Trifles. The first episode hit HBO, the group chat lit up. They all just said, "All of you, watch it now."Virginia  Like, just stop what you’re doing.KimWe have to talk about this collectively. So I watched it in real time. It was a mandate.CorinneAmazing.VirginiaDelightful.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterVirginia  Well, this was so fun. I'm glad we got to chat with you more. Before we wrap up, of course, we have to get you to give us some butter. What do you have for us?(Editor's note: my mind went blank, so we skipped to Corinne and then came back to me.)Corinne  I'm going to recommend a book that I'm reading right now and really enjoying. It's called Long Bright River, and it's by Liz Moore, who wrote God Of the Woods that a lot of people read last year. I've been listening to the audiobook version and it's great. It's kind of a detective/crime situation, but there's a lot of twists and turns, and finding out things about the main character that you didn't know at the beginning. I'm really enjoying it. I'm also not quite done, so if something crazy happens at the end, don't blame me. I think I have only an hour left, so I feel pretty confident recommending it.KimDo you know it's a TV show, too?Corinne  Oh no, I didn't, but that makes so much sense. I was listening to it and thinking it would make a great show. What is the show?Kim  Same name. It has Amanda Seyfried in it.VirginiaOh, I love her. KimIt's a great cast. It's actually a great show.Corinne  I'll have to check that out.Virginia  I love that book. Kim, do you want to go next?Kim  My butter is boba. I somehow had never had it even though there are great places all over Nashville that have it. But back to chicken tenders, near the place I live now, there's a little strip mall and it has a chicken tenders restaurant and a boba place. They're the only two things there. I went over there and they were so nice. They had me taste a bunch of stuff and they made me an iced coffee boba with a brown sugar top off. I'm obsessed with it. Anytime I'm there - it's actually across the street from where I am right now. Will I get one today? Yes, I will.Virginia  I think you need one after our morning.Kim  Why did I wait so long for boba? It's so fun and delicious.Virginia  I have to confess, I don't think I've ever had it.Corinne  This reminds me that there's an amazing TikTok of some guy trying boba for the first time. Virginia  I will endorse an item of clothing. It's fast fashion, which we know makes for a problematic butter, but I know I'm going to stand by this one because it is the third time I've bought this cardigan. It is the pranayama wrap from Athleta. I wear the 2x. It's roomy on me, but it only goes up to 3x. It's not a super size inclusive brand, but Corinne just said she doesn't care.Corinne  I never said that. I feel like a wrap is a flexibly sized item of clothing.Virginia  I agree. Athleta is a brand that frequently makes me mad because Old Navy is making plus sizes. You're the same company. The same as with Gap! I am at the point in winter where my perimenopausal self is cold and hot at the same time, and I can't wear my sweaters because I'm so sweaty. It's a real thing. You just get to a point where your sweaters are too warm, but it's still cold, and what are you going to wear?I've been getting more into the sweatshirt space, but even some of them are too heavy. This wrap is a really good one. It's lightweight, but it's warm, and it comes in different colors. I got this purplish-blue color on sale and I'm living in it. My butter is a layer that you can actually be warm, but not die in.CorinneAmazing.KimI support that. Virginia  Thank you, but I do acknowledge that it is not a great brand, and I would like them to make larger sizes. Kim, this was a delight! Tell folks where they can follow you, at your website and the name you don't like.Kim  The Blonde Mule everywhere is me. As I mentioned, I bought that name.Virginia  She owns it.Kim It’s easy to find me. TheBlondeMule.com is my newsletter where I write about books and pop culture. When I've got the bandwidth, I write essays. And then @TheBlondeMule on all the platforms.Virginia  You'll also find her in the Burnt Toast comments and Big Undies comments. And know that she is working a lot of magic behind the scenes here. You'll probably hear from her more every now and then, as well. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Thanks for listening to Burnt Toast. If you enjoyed the conversation, please support our work with a paid subscription. They start at just $5 a month, and you'll keep Burnt Toast an ad and sponsor free space. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/virginiasolesmith/join.Make sure you are following us for free in your podcast player. Scroll down wherever you're listening, tap the stars, five of them please, and leave us a review. That really helps us grow and helps new listeners find conversations like these.The Burnt Toast Podcast is hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. You can follow Virginia on Instagram at @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.bsky.social. You can follow Corinne on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay.bsky.social and on Patreon at Big Undies.This podcast is produced by Kim Baldwin. You can follow Kim at @theblondemule on all platforms and subscribe to her newsletter at The Blonde Mule.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it's time for your February Extra Butter episode! Listen to hear about:⭐️ Anti-diet GLP-1 life⭐️ Who gets left out when the tradwife aesthetic takes over influencer culture⭐️ Interrogating the ableism of not wanting to be on medication your whole lifePlus, serious stuff, like:⭐️ Corinne in a prairie dress⭐️ How long Virginia will last in a zombie apocalypse ⭐️ Why hot cheese is in for FebruaryTo hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber.Join Extra Butter!

You're listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith. Today my conversation is with Dr. Lauren Muhlheim. Lauren is a psychologist, a fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders, a certified eating disorder specialist and approved consultant for the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals. She's also a Certified Body Trust Provider and directs Eating Disorder Therapy LA, a group practice in Los Angeles. Lauren is the author of When Your Teen Has an Eating Disorder and a co-author of the brand new The Weight-Inclusive CBT Workbook for Eating Disorders. Lauren joined me to chat about how she and her colleagues have been working to make eating disorder treatment less fatphobic, because, yes, that really needed to happen. We also get into why it's feeling harder than ever to treat eating disorders, or live with one, in this era of RFK, Jr., MAHA and GLP-1s. Plus what to do if your child is hiding food, lying or otherwise showing signs of developing an eating disorder. When do you intervene? And how do you do so in the most supportive way possible?If you enjoy this conversation, a paid subscriiption is the best way to support our work!Join Burnt Toast🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 231 TranscriptVirginiaI am really delighted. We have been, I guess I would say, colleagues in this space, or comrades in this space, for a long time.LaurenComrades, for sure. VirginiaI've interviewed you for articles over the years. We're both in the fat activism world in various ways. You're someone I learn so much from. I'm very excited to have you here today. We are going to talk about your new workbook that comes out this month, called The Weight-Inclusive CBT Workbook for Eating Disorders. Do you want to give us a little background on how this workbook came to be? Then we're going to dive into my list of questions.LaurenI should introduce CBT for eating disorders. CBT stands for cognitive behavioral therapy for eating disorders, which is one of the leading treatments. I was trained in it back in the 1990s by one of the two main researchers who's credited with developing the treatment. Cognitive behavioral therapy looks at what's maintaining a problem in the present. It looks at the relationship between thoughts, behaviors and feelings, and helps to sort out ways to solve problematic behaviors related to eating. Fast forward to present day, we've learned a lot more about eating disorders than back in the '90s when I was trained in the model. When I was trained, it was very weight-centric, focused on primarily low weight and "normal weight." You know, thin-ish white women, and that's who was largely studied. But now we know so much more - that eating disorders affect all people, all genders, all ethnicities and all body sizes. As I've evolved as a clinician over the last 20 years, I've really become influenced by the weight inclusive movement, Health At Every Size and listening to people with lived experience who have experienced harm from traditional weight-centric treatments. So I have evolved. And in my mind I had modified what I was doing, and when I went back to look at the manuals, I was horrified to remember what was still in there that was really weight-centric. This has been a passion project for the last eight years. I've collaborated and talked to different people about it. I ultimately teamed up with two colleagues who were as passionate as I am, and we came up with the idea of modifying CBT to be weight inclusive. We coined CBTWI to be weight inclusive, and we took the 30 year old manuals and updated them to be relevant to today and to speak to people in all size bodies. A lot of people come to us in bigger bodies and the old manuals were so harmful. You know, focusing on about being the right weight and other elements that were just not conducive to people in larger bodies when they go through this work.VirginiaCan you give a specific example? For folks who've never been in eating disorder treatment, or just don't know the world well, it's like, 'What do you mean eating disorder treatments are not weight inclusive? Isn't that where you go to feel better about your body?' Give an example of what CBT used to do that was harmful, and how you've updated it.LaurenWhen I was trained in CBT, I always thought it was a non-diet approach, because the focus is on regular eating and including all foods. So the center of the model is still good. But some of the fatphobic elements that were in the original treatment were - one was this insistence on regular weekly weighing and the client knowing their weight. And that if the therapist refused to weigh the client weekly, it was the therapist's own anxiety and avoidance of tolerating the client's distress over being weighed. But if you're in a bigger body, being weighed is more than just exposure. It can be traumatic. VirginiaYeah. LaurenWe don't need to put people through that, where every week they see their weight. So that's one of the first things that we eliminated. The other thing, there's behavioral experiments with a focus on challenging what they call the broken cognition. The broken cognition is this belief, and again, this was developed on primarily thin, white women who had the belief that if 'I eat a cupcake, I'll gain five pounds.' The behavioral experiment was to have them eat a cupcake, weigh them before and weigh them the following week, and prove that they didn't gain five pounds, but that's also hugely fatphobic. Because you're trying to prove to people that it's all in their heads, that weight stigma is not a thing.VirginiaWell, and you're saying, 'Look, the scary, terrible thing didn't happen.'LaurenWhich reinforces that that's the scariest thing.VirginiaEven what you're saying, weighing folks in bigger bodies can be traumatic, not because inherently it's bad to be in a bigger body, but because if you're in a bigger body and you've been weighed in medical settings, you've had that number weaponized against you for so long. That's the trauma you're alluding to. LaurenYes, exactly.VirginiaI see, so it was a lot of methodology around weight numbers meant to reassure thin women that 'Don't worry, you won't get fat.'LaurenExactly.VirginiaWhich really leaves out any fat person with an eating disorder, and doesn't really do the thin women any favors either.LaurenRight. Because it just reinforces this fear that weight gain is the worst thing that could happen to somebody.VirginiaThat's fascinating. It sounds like a lot of very much needed updates and a really terrific resource for folks. I saw in the back of the workbook under Resources, you listed Burnt Toast as one of the newsletters with an online community dialogue. It means a lot to have us spotlighted in this way. We do work hard to have our chat rooms and safe spaces in the comment section for folks coming for support. You also listed a lot of folks that we love and look to as leaders in this space: Christy Harrison, Ragen Chastain, Rachel Milner, Sabrina Strings, Bree Campos, Chrissy King, etc. How do you think about the importance of community in the work you do with your clients as you've been reframing CBT in this way?LaurenWe are big fans of yours and all the people you've named, and it was really important to us because here we are, three white women with privilege doing the updating of CBT and we wanted to take it further. It was really important to us that we learned from people with more marginalized identities. We negotiated with our editor to have sensitivity readers and we had people advising us on some of the things that we might not have been as aware of, like food insecurity, gender considerations, and the experience of people in larger bodies. As references, we tried to include some of the thought leaders that we've really learned from. Community is super important in this work because we're asking people to go against the grain of society. Many of the people that come to us for help with eating disorders are people in larger bodies who have been told by medical doctors and people in their lives to lose weight. And then they come to us and we say, 'Well, you're not eating enough.' And they think we're kind of crazy to say that. It really helps when you're asking people to do this work, which is so hard, to have other people in their lives who are supporting this. Many people don't have people in their personal lives who are anti-diet. Where do you find those people? A lot of it is online and in podcasts. I always tell people it helps, even if it's you and me and the person listening to the podcast. They're hearing the interviewer and the guest and there's two other people who are in this world with you. VirginiaThat's right.LaurenIt helps a lot. And I do think that is the missing piece for people in bigger bodies who experience disordered eating - they don't have the support.VirginiaEspecially right now. We're in a really dark cultural moment. You know, just like a swirling vortex of badness in a lot of ways. So it feels even harder, because what the federal government is telling us, what we're seeing in the news, etc, etc, is also running counter to what will actually promote healing. To that end, I'd love if we could talk a little bit about how you're thinking about your work in this dark time. We just had RFK’s latest USDA dietary guidelines come out. Lauren, how are you feeling about the new food pyramid?LaurenSadly, I feel like I am not going to be able to retire anytime soon. The culture just propagates and perpetuates disordered eating in so many ways. Obviously eating is so much more individualized than just following a guideline, but what I can say is that I have never seen a person with binge eating who was not restricting their carbs. VirginiaThat’s really interesting.LaurenCarbs are basically the building blocks of what we eat, and they should be. A lot of the people who complain of what has now been popularized as the term "food noise," are not eating enough, and especially not eating enough carbs or starches. I expect that we'll see many more people coming in saying, 'I'm preoccupied with thoughts of food,' or 'I'm bingeing,' or 'I'm emotionally eating.' In our work, and what our workbook focuses on, is 'Are you eating enough regularly throughout the day? Are you including the various food groups? Are you eating enough starches and fats?' That's the mainstay of recovering from an eating disorder.VirginiaFeeding your brain.LaurenYour brain needs glucose to think logically.VirginiaYeah, and not just at the tiny bottom point of the pyramid, but throughout the day. This is something I've learned from you that I want to make sure we say really clearly, because I think it's something people know but lose track of in their own work on these issues. Often folks come to you and say, 'I binge eat. I'm out of control with food.' When you start working with them your take is quite different.LaurenRight. All the eating disorders are really driven by restriction or not eating enough, and it's true that most people come to us and think they're eating too much. They're complaining about emotional eating or binge eating. As a cognitive behavioral therapist, one of the things that CBT therapists do is ask people to keep records. Early on I was taught to have people record what they're eating, and that really offers an insight into what's going on. In my group practice, we do a lot of training of more junior clinicians, including graduate students. It's really exciting to me when I have a graduate student who's been with me for a couple months, and I say, "Well, what do you think the diagnosis is?" And they'll say to me, "Well, I'm waiting to see the food records because the person's complaining that they're eating too much." But they know from having been through this a few times, that when you see what someone's eating, you see a lot of restriction, a lot of skipped meals, a lot of very sparse meals. People really do think they're eating so much because the culture is so focused on eating these very low intakes, and that's been kind of normalized on social media by wellness culture. People are really shocked when we tell them that they need to eat more, and that is the biggest part of it. Regular eating is kind of the antidote to all disordered eating. In our workbook, we're always like, 'Are you sure you're eating enough?' And I don't want to reinforce dieting by teaching someone strategies to prevent binge eating when they're not eating enough because I'm not going to be successful at that. Because that's the hunger drive and that's what keeps us alive. People may have short term strategies that work, but I definitely don't work on stopping the binge eating or the emotional eating until someone is really eating enough.VirginiaEating enough to support the idea that you would eat less at this one point in the day.LaurenAnd then most often, a lot of the binge eating and emotional eating decreases once people start to eat more regularly at meals and snacks. The food noise goes down.VirginiaLet's talk about food noise. The rise of GLP-1s has really popularized that concept, but also, I would say, as you noted, misdefined it in many situations. How is all of that discourse impacting your work with your clients right now?LaurenIt's definitely impacting us. We are seeing a lot of people coming in on GLP-1s, or contemplating GLP-1s. We always need to distinguish people who are on GLP-1s for medical conditions versus people on them solely for weight loss. One of the problems with being on them for weight loss is that they're on higher dosages, and that's where you get more side effects. We do get some people who come in complaining of binge eating or emotional eating, and then they're on a GLP-1 and they suddenly have no appetite. It's harder to get them to eat enough throughout the day.VirginiaRight. If you're trying to go back and say, 'Wait, let's look at where you're restricting,' and now they can't access any appetite to eat.LaurenOr they're nauseous and throwing up. VirginiaOh, God.LaurenWe have been successful in a number of cases in helping our clients advocate for their doctors to actually lower their doses. Sometimes that helps, but there's a lot of nuance, right? I think we don't know enough about the full impact of these medications. Might there be some benefit for people with eating disorders in certain circumstances? Maybe. But it's a scary thing, and it definitely makes our work harder when we're focused on trying to get people to eat regularly throughout the day.VirginiaThat concept's been getting a lot of media attention, GLP-1s as an eating disorder treatment. But it sounds like you have major reservations about that idea.LaurenBecause it does the opposite of the work we're trying to get people to do. Cognitive behavioral therapy is the best validated treatment. It was developed in the '90s and there's a lot of research to support it. The model is regular eating, including all foods, not being restrictive. And symptoms typically get better. We know that with weight loss, most people don't keep weight off long term.VirginiaRight, and most people aren't able to stay on these drugs long term is also what we're seeing in a lot of research now.LaurenWe do see some people who have been on GLP-1s and then they go off them and their weight is increasing and maybe the binge eating is coming back and starting again. It's a bit of a quick fix. That doesn't solve the problem.VirginiaIt's just rooted in that old thinking of binge eaters must eat too much, take away their appetite, solve binge eating, as opposed to what you've been steadily making the case for. And all the evidence is showing binge eaters are responding to restriction. And so a drug that encourages more restriction, how would that long term solve binge eating? I would love to also talk a little bit about managing eating disorders and disordered eating in kids. You specialize in teenagers. Whenever I have a reader or a friend, as I now parent a middle schooler, reach out with concerns. I'm always like, 'Check out. Dr. Mulheim's work. This is your first stop.' You're a big proponent of Family Based Treatment, FBT, for adolescent eating disorders. On your website you wrote, "I do not believe that parents cause eating disorders, but I know they can be an important part of the solution. Hence, I'm an advocate for the inclusion of parents in the treatment of their children."Let's talk a little bit about how parents can help. What behaviors and symptoms do you take seriously? How do you be part of that solution?LaurenThe first thing is that eating disorders in children and teens is harder to spot than you think. My advice to parents is, if you have concerns, definitely check them out. Some of the signs we see are stopping eating certain foods, eliminating dessert or not eating meals and saying they've already eaten. We may not see weight loss in in a child or a teen. They may just fail to gain, because remember, they're supposed to be gaining over time. Sometimes they're growing and they're not gaining, and that's the equivalent to weight loss in an adult. We also see things like social withdrawal. What looks like depression, poor sleep, or loss of interest in activities. It can look like depression or anxiety. Or complaints of stomach aches. A lot of parents go down the gastrointestinal route, trying to figure out what's going on. It can be very confusing. Family based treatment is a wonderful evidence based treatment. It was developed at Stanford and it's a manualized treatment that basically allows teens to recover in the home. Because traditionally, teens were pulled out of the home. Parents were blamed. There was this saying about how it was always the mother's fault.VirginiaOf course. Clearly.LaurenClearly following on the trend of the schizophrenogenic mother, the autistic mother.VirginiaWe cause autism. We cause eating disorders. LaurenThat has really perpetuated. I still meet people who say it must be the parents. I try to remember we're all in this culture and parents are doing their best. Parents are getting diet messages from all these other health professionals in our culture. I try to remember that they become the messengers of the cultural message. There is often dieting in the home, but does that cause eating disorders in itself? No. And we see that because not all siblings develop an eating disorder. A lot of parents diet and their kids don't develop eating disorders. We have to give parents a chance. The great thing about FBT is it's done through family meals and normalizing eating all foods. It's a great chance for families to come together. I find it very powerful when the parents are unlearning their diet culture with their teens. They're able to do that. Sometimes it's a little bit of a hard wake up call, but most parents can get on board pretty quickly. It's really powerful when you see a whole family change the way they've been eating. It gives the parents a chance to learn the information. Whereas if the teen goes off to residential, the family doesn't come along and then the teen goes back into that home, so it's challenging. It's a lot of work for parents because they become the treatment team. VirginiaIt is a lot of sitting at the table with a kid who doesn't want to eat, which, any parent, regardless of whether they've managed an eating disorder, can tell you that's a nightmare. That's really hard to do and often it can feel counter to some of the other messages we get. If you're looking at the Ellen Satter model of feeding kids, it will be very much not forcing kids to take bites, and in FBT, when you have a kid refeeding after a lot of restriction, you do have to require them to eat. And that feels really strange. Some of the interviews I've done with families who've done this, it is so moving to hear the parents work through their own stuff and come together in a different way to support the child. It's pretty transformative. For parents who are noticing some of the early symptoms, like hiding food, or kids may be lying about what they're eating, how do you recommend parents manage things in those stages? Like, okay, I'm keeping an eye. I'm probably going to talk to the pediatrician. Probably going to, you know, do I need to level this up? And also, how do I react in the moment to some of this stuff?LaurenWith as much compassion as they can, and in a non-shaming way. If you think that you know your kids are lying about what they're eating or hiding food, we really want to just encourage them to eat more with you. Which, again, this comes back to all eating disorders require people to eat more. If someone's hiding food, maybe they're not getting enough at meals. If someone is refusing to eat meals, they're not getting enough at meals. It's a good chance for parents to be more watchful, to try to make sure that meals are eaten and that teens and children have access to a variety of foods. That they're getting their nutritional needs met. A lot of parents, again, because the cultural messaging is so intense, think people should be eating less. If you've taken care of a growing teen, you see how much they need.VirginiaHow much your grocery bill has increased.LaurenParents may not be aware that their teens are supposed to be going through growth spurts. I do some trainings with Rebecca Peebles, who's an amazing pediatrician, and she emphasizes how teens are supposed to gain about 50 pounds as they go through puberty. Where are you going to get that weight if you're not eating enough. The growth pattern for a lot of kids is to grow out before they grow up. There's supposed to be this weight gain. We observe teens who are starting to gain weight to fuel this growth, and then someone panics, whether it's the pediatrician or a parent or the child themselves, and they start to restrict. That's the prime time for when anorexia can strike. If they had been left alone, they would have just gained and grown. Now you have to do all this work to get them back to that weight so that they can start to grow again. VirginiaI think that's so helpful to normalize. This is what we want our kids to be doing. I'm parenting middle schoolers and I am shocked sometimes how fast a group of 12 year olds can empty the snack cabinet or the ice cream freezer, but this is what we want them to be doing right now. When you see that hiding food behavior, parents often think they need to correct that behavior, instead of stepping back and thinking about what led to the hiding. And is this a food that you've given a message they shouldn't have as much of? Or as you're saying, are there other parts in the day where they're not getting enough? I also think a lot about the schedules these kids are under. They're at school all day, then they're going to sports or play rehearsal. My kid was out of the house for 12 hours yesterday. She was starving when she got home, and if you are coming with a diet mindset, you might be alarmed by that. But it completely makes sense that she didn't have enough time to eat during her school day and needed to make up for it. LaurenYeah. VirginiaWell, this is so helpful. Your work is reassuring and grounded. Whether folks are dealing with an active eating disorder or not, if you're parenting teens, if you're working on your own stuff with food, Lauren's work is an incredible resource. The workbook is really great, so thank you for that.LaurenThank you. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterVirginiaSo we wrap up every episode of Burnt Toast with butter, which is our recommendation segment. Do you have any butter for us today?LaurenI've been having a lot of fun with gardening fruit trees in Los Angeles. It's been really fun. I just recently pruned a peach tree to get it ready to hopefully bud and produce fruit. Peach trees have to be shaped in a certain way. You don't want the central leader you've got to have key branches. So I studied, and then you have to reduce the fruit, which is very sad.VirginiaOh, you have to cut off baby fruit. LaurenYou have to cut off baby fruit because otherwise it just produces too much. You want to select which peaches are going to get bigger. That's been fun. And I'm growing an avocado tree. Pretty soon I have to go outside and spray it with sugar water to encourage the bees.VirginiaAmazing.LaurenTo hopefully pollinate it. I love that. I've been hand pollinating my passion fruit vine, which is a whole other thing.VirginiaI am so jealous that you can do all of this outside. I am currently raising a indoor orange tree because I live in New York and it is 20 degrees today. It is stressful. I have to tell you, Lauren, I don't think she's living her best life right now. I mean, who among us is in this time of year, but I just added a humidifier because I got a hygrometer. She was starting to lose leaves and her humidity was only 22% because it's so cold, even inside my heated house. It's so cold and dry. So my butter is going to be my humidifier for my orange tree. I'm hopeful, because she's got fruit on her, and it's starting to ripen, but she's dropping leaves because the air is too dry. It's high stakes over here right now with the orange tree.LaurenBeing able to grow outside. VIrginiaIt's more logical than what I'm doing, but I just love the idea of fruit trees. We do have, in my garden outside, blueberry bushes, raspberry bushes, all that stuff. But I wanted year round joy.LaurenIn California we have to get the no freeze hours berries.VirginiaIt's a whole different world over there. Fascinating. Well, yay! Here's for fruit trees for everybody! I don't know if I want to recommend everybody get an indoor fruit tree, because it is quite a project, but she is bringing me a lot of joy, as well as I'm stressing and over there filling her humidifier twice a day.LaurenRight? It’s a lot of work to take care of these trees.VirginiaBut I'm on it.LaurenI'll be back spraying my avocado tree with sugar to invite the bees.VirginiaYou know what? There's also something to be said for an obsessive hobby right now to just give you a little thing to focus on. I can do this. I can spray this tree with sugar water. Because there's a lot we can't control. So you know what? Fruit tree farming seems like a great use of energy. LaurenAnd then you get to eat them. VirginiaYes, exactly, and that's what I'm really excited for. And make delicious beverages and whatnot. Lauren, tell folks where we can find you. How we can support your work.LaurenMy website is https://www.eatingdisordertherapyla.com/. That's where my group practice information is, and my books are listed there. I have blog with a lot of resources for people with eating disorders, and for parents. My books are available wherever you buy books. They're both by New Harbinger Publications and The Weight-Inclusive CBT Workbook for Eating Disorders is available now.VirginiaAmazing. We'll link to all of that. Thank you for being here.LaurenThank you so much for having me.Thanks for listening to Burnt Toast. If you enjoyed the conversation, please support our work with a paid subscription. They start at just $5 a month, and you'll keep Burnt Toast an ad and sponsor free space. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/virginiasolesmith/join. Make sure you are following us for free in your podcast player. Scroll down wherever you're listening, tap the stars, five of them please, and leave us a review. That really helps us grow and helps new listeners find conversations like these. The Burnt Toast Podcast is hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. You can follow Virginia on Instagram at @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.bsky.social. You can follow Corinne on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay.bsky.social and on Patreon at Big Undies. This podcast is produced by Kim Baldwin. You can follow Kim at @theblondemule on all platforms and subscribe to her newsletter at The Blonde Mule. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay and it’s time for a BONUS January Indulgence Gospel!This episode is free for everyone. If you enjoy it, consider a paid subscription to Burnt Toast! It's the best way to support our work and keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space. You'll also get behind some of our most popular paywalled episodes like: 🧈 Why is Katie Sturino Working for Weight Watchers?🧈Don't Go On the Pete Wells Diet🧈The Mel Robbins Cult of High FivesAnd more! (Find every Indulgence Gospel episode here.) Never miss another episode! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈This episode may contain affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 230 TranscriptVirginiaSo today we are just catching you up on some general January news. These are things that are happening in our lives and the world. And then we're going to answer a few listener questions. CorinneThis is kind of my favorite type of episode, VirginiaSame. Do you want to go first? Do you have an update for us? Some news? CorinneOne thing that I've been dying to ask you, and I've kind of been holding back on is... have you watched Heated Rivalry. VirginiaI haven't watched it. CorinneOkay, but do you know what I'm talking about?VirginiaWell, I'm just going to Google it real quick.CorinneOh, my God. No! Don't even Google it. This is what you need to do this weekend. Wait, do you have a kid-free weekend because it's not kid-friendly.VirginiaOh come on, it’s a sports thing! CorinneThere is so little sports. Let me just tell you.VirginiaOkay...CorinneIf you're watching it for the sports, you will be disappointed. There' is no sports, okay? No sports. Basically, if the camera was one inch lower, it would be porn. VirginiaOh! Okay. CorinneIt's based on, like, gay romance novels.VirginiaOhhhhh it's the gay hockey players! Yes, alright. Watching. I am kid-free and I will be doing that this weekend. CorinneAnd I think Jack will like it as well. So I recommend you watch it together. VirginiaObviously.CorinneIt's very horny. Whoa. And I will say: I watched like, half of the first episode, and I was like, I don't think this is for me. And then it was, like, popping off on the Internet. So I was like, all right, I gotta give it another try. And now I'm, like, obsessed with Connor Storrie.VirginiaSo okay, is it like you're watching it because it's so absurd? Or are you invested in the characters? CorinneI'm invested. VirginiaYou're invested.CorinneIt's just like a romance novel. They're both different kinds of sports tropes. One of them's kind of like a tough guy from Russia, and the other one's a little softie Canadian. It's very sweet. And I think that the actors have a lot of chemistry. And you see their butts a lot.VirginiaWell, I'm in. We'll watch this this weekend. I mean, I have read many a hockey player romance novel. Some of them were gay.  CorinneThen you've probably read the novels.VirginiaI may have read the novels. Although I don't like hockey, I have to say, I'm never going to be a pick me girl for hockey. It's a confusing sport to me. CorinneThere's like, basically no hockey. Having watched the whole thing I can tell you nothing about hockey.Virginia You have learned nothing.Corinne There's like, cup that you can win? That's all I know.VirginiaOh yes. Wait. I want to call it a Stanley Cup? But isn't that the water bottles? Or is there also a hockey Stanley Cup?CorinneI don't know, Virginia and I don't care. Gay hockey forever.VirginiaDelightful. This is an amazing update. We are actually watching the second season of Bad Sisters right now, on your recommendation. So we do have to finish that up. I didn't think that it could pull off a good second season, but they really are delivering. And then in my parenting life, I'm continuing to work through Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my 12 year old. It's a delight. I really do feel like you maybe need to consider a Buffy watch at some point.CorinneNext time I have 47 hours unscheduled weeks.VirginiaI mean, you can chip away at it too. It's on Disney Plus! Oh wait, you probably don't have Disney Plus. CorinneMy bad. VirginiaNo that's fair. Well, it's been very fun we're in season four now for the Buffy fans in the audience. And it's going to start getting a little more violent. I'll have to feel it out. But I think we're, at the point of no return. That's a good TV update. Have you been reading anything good? I read a book that I think you liked, and I don't think I liked it. But I think I'm in the minority. CorinneWhich book?VirginiaHeart The Lover by Lily King.CorinneOh, my God, you didn't like it?!VirginiaNo. What am I missing? CorinneWhat didn't you like? VirginiaI felt like they were all so annoying and pretentious. Is it because I was an English major, so I don't like English majors? We're just pretty annoying, with all the literary references. Okay, we get it. You are boys who read books. I was just like, why would you sleep with either one of them? I don't get it.CorinneOh, fascinating. I mean, I was just sobbing for the entire second half.VirginiaIt does get sad in the second half, but I didn't like him, so I didn't care?CorinneYou weren't invested.VirginiaAnd it's not hard to get me invested in a health journey of any sort! I'm not going to spoil it for anyone, but—okay, spoiler alert! We're going to talk about it with spoilers, so that we can really get into it. If you didn't read that book, you'll want to skip ahead about a minute and a half. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈SCROLL TO NEXT SET OF BUTTER EMOJIS TO AVOID SPOILERS!Okay, I thought it was real weird that she gave a kid up for adoption, and then was just like, "But I know she's fine. It's fine. It's all fine." And yet she was so worried about the kid she did have who had health issues. I mean, of course she was worried about him— but she had just mentally been like, that one's fine. I picked good people. They had a nice photo. So I know she's having a great childhood. That was really weird to me. CorinneI mean, I felt like that seemed like the decision of a young, stressed out person,VirginiaYeah, maybe. And how she keeps talking about it is meant to be a trauma response?CorinneIt was a questionable young person decision.VirginiaYes, definitely. But it felt weird that she would never reflect further upon it as she got into her own motherhood. I'm not saying she was wrong to give the baby up for her adoption. I also think abortion exists, and that would have made sense. But I'm not saying she should have kept the child. I just thought, don't you think you would have gotten any more nuanced in your feelings about it as the years went on?CorinneThe book is her getting more nuanced about it. Right?VirginiaNot really! Not about the baby. She's like, Yeah, she's fine. I mean, she finally tells him about it, but.CorinneI don't know. I think she was kind of in denial about it, or just avoiding it, and then the book is her coming to terms with it. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈END OF SPOILERSVirginiaWell, I just felt like everyone was pretentious and unlikable. And it feels like everyone loves this book so much, and I don't know what I missed. CorinneHave you read her other books? VirginiaNo, this was my first Lily King, CorinneOkay, because there's also, like a connection to one of the other books. VirginiaWell, I'm not going to read it because I didn't like any of these people. But Corinne loved it, guys, so if you love it, if you've read it, let us know in the comments! I was just surprised. This is the first time I've ever not liked one of your book recs.CorinneI am a little surprised, but I think maybe I'm primed to like those college, academic group of kids books. That's a genre I really like. Virginia I think it's a genre I don't like. I think I actively dislike reading about people in college.CorinneYeah, it's interesting, because I'm not like, looking back fondly on my own experience at that time. Yeah. I think I just like, enjoy the dynamics. Did you read A Secret History? VirginiaNo, CorinneI love that book. So I feel like, this was maybe tapping into that.VirginiaI think I just think academia is very pretentious? CorinneIsn't one of your parents a professor? VirginiaYes I was raised by professors. CorinneSo maybe there's something there. VirginiaThree out of four of my parents have worked as professors. So yes. I grew up in academia. CorinneOkay, well, none of mine have. VirginiaWell, I am now reading The Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. It's about this woman, who's sort of lost  in her life and moves into a convent. And I keep thinking "Corinne would really like this book." CorinneIt does sound good to me. Virginia I don't know if I like it, but I do think you would really like it. Usually I'm a big do not finisher if I don't like a book. And I will say Heart The Lover was a snappy read. So I kept going. Because I was like, well, Corinne loved this book, so I'll keep reading to find out when I'll love it. And that was never, but it was a fast read, and this one is too. I'm moving through it quickly, but I think I do need to really root for the characters.CorinneThat's funny. I have a conversation like this a lot with my mom, because she doesn't like books where the characters are too flawed. We always say it like, if she doesn't like them, she, doesn't want to read it.VirginiaI am okay with flawed, but they have to be flawed and likable.CorinneThey have to have redeeming qualities,VirginiaAnd maybe some awareness of their flawedness in a interesting way?. I don't know. I don't need them to be good people, but I guess, endearing? And in these two books, I'm not finding anyone that endearing. But they are interesting, all right. CorinneWell I'm also extremely curious to hear about your 30 Day Strength Challenge.VirginiaOkay, yes! So despite the fact that in our New Year's Day episode, I was like, "We're not doing any January fitness challenges!" Three days later, I was like, Oh, I'm doing a fitness challenge. It's a challenge created by friend of the show, beloved podcast guest, Anna Maltby, who writes the How to Move newsletter. And she has a 30 day strength training challenge going on this month. And I saw it, and I love Anna, but I wasn't going to do it. Because I was just like, oh, I'm not going to do that. And then my friend Mary texted a bunch of us and was like, "I really want to do the strength training challenge. Who's in?" and I was like, "Oh, all right, sure, I'll do it with you!" And, it's very fun. It's getting me to work out consistently five days a week, which I never do! Oh, let me pause and say, we're going to talk some specifics on weights. If you don't want to hear numbers, skip ahead. Man, I'm just getting people to fast forward through this whole episode! We're done with book spoilers, but we might mention weight numbers. So if you don't want that... skip ahead again.CorinneAnd just to clarify, you mean weight lifting numbers. Not body weight numbers. BUTTER EMOJIS AROUND WEIGHT TALK🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈VirginiaNo, no, no, no. This has nothing to do with body weight. I am not doing this to lose weight. I am doing this to support my friend who wants to do the challenge, and because I kind of liked the idea of seeing what it would feel like to increase my weight training for a month. CorinneSo, my question is: It's a 30 day challenge, but you're not doing strength workouts every day for 30 days, right? VirginiaNo, Anna makes her programs very customizable, so you could really do anything. You could do one workout a week and be like, "This is my 30 day challenge." She lets you make your own plan. She does include a suggested schedule, which is six workouts a week, but only three of them are weights. It's three days of weights, two days of cardio and then a Pilates day. I'm trimming it down to five days. [Post-recording correction: It's actually 2 days of weights, plus a "core and conditioning" HIIT workout where only one move involves a weight. Plus 3 suggested cardio and Pilates days.]And my main goal for this is to see: Is this helping me reliably carve out a few more workout windows in my week? It's getting me to try out days when I wouldn't normally do a workout., and see, does it make sense with the schedule? If so, when I'm done with this challenge, then I'll reflect on, do I want to keep this schedule? Do I want to do go back to two days of weights but do a little more cardio? I'm kind of just using it as, a see how it feels to do more weights and more workouts. To see how it feels to do more movement, and then think about what kind of movement I think I want to keep doing. CorinneCool.Virginia Yeah. it's been fun so far. I did print out the little calendar and write down my plan, and I've been giving myself little stickers. So we love that. I'm only a week into it at this point, so it could all fall apart. But I think Anna's so good at creating challenges that aren't about losing weight. She says this is more prescriptive than her usual work. She is encouraging you to make a schedule and stick to a schedule, to give yourself some accountability, which I think can be interesting. But there's no weight loss goal. She really wants people to feel empowered to develop weightlifting workouts they do on their own, not with the aid of a video. And I love you Anna, but I'm not going to do that. I just want you to tell me what to do all the time. CorinneTotally. VirginiaI don't want fitness mental load, but I am following her advice to, keep track of how much weight I'm lifting. And then to see over the course of the month, if I can increase that weight. So right now there are some moves where I only use 10 or 15 lb weights. Can we go up to 20 or 30? We'll see! CorinneI spoke to someone else who is doing this challenge. They were very sore!VirginiaYeah, I'm pretty sore. Yesterday, we did a weights workout, and there was one move that required bands, and we didn't have bands. And two of my friends came to do it with me. So we substituted side planks for those moves, and it turned out to be quite a lot of side planks, and my obliques are real unhappy, But, you know, it's like, the good kind of sore where you're like, Oh, I did a thing, yay. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈WEIGHT LIFTING TALK OVERWhat about you? How's power lifting going these days?Corinneit's going good. I kind of haven't been going very much, because it was just December. Like, did I go at all in December? I feel like maybe just the first week or two.Virginiabut then you were driving to Oregon and back.CorinneYes, my mom was here and we traveled. So I'm kind of, getting back into it after a little break. And that's always a little hard. For the first couple workouts back, you're like, Oh, I'm weak. VirginiaOr I like to reframe it as, Wow, I can really feel like I got a hard workout without doing too much.CorinneSo that's where I'm at. Beginning again! VirginiaWell, it is the time of year for that. And also, I support everyone not doing workout challenges. One of my friends who's doing this challenge, as of this recording, has yet to do a workout even though we're six days in because she has Covid, poor thing. So I think it's really good to do these things, but not do them in a overly obsessive way. Oh and I have a low key goal for myself this year of improving my flexibility. I really would like to have an easier time getting off of the floor. CorinneIs that related to flexibility or not? VirginiaI think it's a combination of flexibility and strength. If I think more about my glute muscles, I can get off the floor more easily. But there is also some reaching involved, and I don't know there's mobility, for sure. And I feel like as I've been getting stronger, I've also been getting a little stiffer. And getting off the floor is hard. CorinneYeah, it is.VirginiaAnd it's not a moral imperative, but I end up on the floor a lot because I have kids, so I would like it to be easier to get out of that position. CorinneMaybe you need to get rid of all your furniture.VirginiaThat's the thing. That's what we'll do. CorinneBecause sometimes I sit on the floor when I'm watching TV. I don't know why. I'm just more comfortable. So maybe I should just get rid of all my furniture.VirginiaProbably that's the next logical step. CorinneI am not sitting on the couch while I watch TV. VirginiaBut make sure to keep it in your neighbor's house or your in-laws house. CorinneMy auxiliary house. VirginiaSo you can go work on it during the day. For folks who are like, what are they talking about? This is a reference to an episode we did where we looked at is everything a diet, and we looked at an article from Dwell by a man who had given up all of his furniture in service of his family's health. And we're here to say you don't have to do that. Chairs are great.Okay. The other thing I wanted to tell you about is my new orange tree.CorinneWow. This is an indoor tree.VirginiaIt's an indoor tree. It's my favorite thing I got for Christmas. My mom got me an orange tree, and my eight year old has named it Olive Piper. So it is Olive Piper, the tree. CorinneOlive the orange tree. VirginiaDon't overthink it. But it has two oranges on it! They're green, but I'm tracking them turning orange. My mom has an orange tree, and she's been getting lots of oranges off it. And I think she has better light than I do, but I'm really optimistic. It's an exciting new thing to obsess over.Corinne That's really exciting.VirginiaAnd if we do get oranges, how thrilling will it be?CorinneIt seems like an orange tree would smell good.VirginiaIt doesn't smell like anything right now, but I think maybe once the fruit ripens. CorinneOr I guess I was thinking of flowers,VirginiaOh yes, Well if anyone does indoor citrus, hit me up with your tips. Because I don't know a lot about it's life cycle, I'm worried about how much to water it, all that kind of stuff.CorinneI wonder if in the summer, you can put it outside.VirginiaWell, my mom strongly advised against it. She tried that and it was like an orange tree crisis. I guess citrus trees are prone to bugs and funguses and so if it's happy, just keep it where it is, just keep it happy. It's pretty big, too. CorinneShould we do some questions?VirginiaLet's do some listener questions.CorinneAll right. The first one is, What should I say to a friend when they are complaining about their own body?VirginiaOh, these are always such annoying moments. Truly, just annoyed for you. CorinneI think there are two sides here. One side is: It's clearly bothering you. And the other side is: Can you empathize with your friend who's clearly having a hard time. So I think you kind of need to balance how much it's bothering with you, with, how much it's bothering them. Do you want to just set a hard boundary? Like, "I'd rather not talk about this." Or do you want to be like, "That's really hard, my body bothers me sometimes too." VirginiaHow much do you think the relative body sizes of the friends matters here?CorinneI think if it's someone smaller than you, it might be triggering to you in a different way. And you might want to just set a boundary, versus if it's someone who's bigger than you complaining about their body. VirginiaYeah, I think it does matter. I think if it's someone smaller than you, it's okay to say, Hey, I'm sorry you're having a hard time, but I am not the person for this conversation. Wish you well with that, but I'm not the person for this. If it's someone bigger than you—I don't want to invalidate your own struggles with your body, but can you understand it more from the perspective of they experience bias and stigma that you don't deal with, and find empathy for it is harder for them to navigate seating or doctors or clothing access, etc. I think that has to play into it.CorinneThere's also layers of privilege with this stuff though, that you might not know about. Like a thinner person could also be more disabled, or a transgender person or a person of color. VirginiaGood point. CorinneAlso, there are no details in this question. Like, what are they complaining about? VirginiaI assume weight, if they sent it to us! CorinneYes, but maybe they're complaining about, my butt is too big for this chair, or people stare at me when I do XYZ thing, versus, just like I have flabby muffin top, right?VirginiaThat's interesting. I think if someone is just denigrating their body, that is harder to absorb as a friend than someone who's like, "I'm talking about what's difficult in my lived experience of my body." CorinneTotally,VirginiaBut on the other hand, of course, people do really struggle emotionally with feeling negative about how their body looks. So I'm not saying they don't deserve a place to vent about that. But if they're venting requires the use of anti-fat language, that's a problem. If your best friend is New York Times restaurant reviewer Pete Wells, I think you should set a boundary and say, "Pete, I don't want to hear about how you lost the weight of a basset hound." If the only way they can talk about their struggle is to invoke anti-fat rhetoric and language, I think you should set a boundary. CorinneI think that's a good way of talking about it. Like, what are they complaining about? Is it anti-fatness, or is it something else.VirginiaThe next question is a very fun one. Please tell us about your pets, including their names and origin stories.CorinneI'll go first because I only have one pet.  I have a dog named Bunny. I've had her for almost 10 years, and she's around 11. I got her from a shelter in Albuquerque when I moved here, or not long after I moved here. I had been knowing I wanted a dog, and I was living in a bunch of situations where I was not allowed to have a dog. So as soon as I entered a situation where I was, I got a dog. She's a pit bull. She was a scrawny little shelter dog. And now she's kind of entering her old ladyhood.Virginia11. Wow.Corinne I love her. She's also kind of bad. She's, not great with other dogs, not great with, like, smaller creatures in general. But yeah, she's my dog, so! VirginiaShe's allowed to have preferences and feelings about the world. I admire Bunny from afar. When Corinne drives to Maine, and I'm always like,"Come and stay on your way to Maine in New York!" She's like, our dogs can't be friends. So we haven't figured that out yet.CorinneAlso, also chickens. VirginiaWell, the chickens are in a coop. I mean, it's easy to keep Bunny away from the chickens. I promise, okay. Speaking of, yes, I have chickens.CorinneHow many pets do you have? Would you say?VirginiaI currently oversee? Manage? I manage a flock of 13 animals. CorinneWow. Does that include the chickens?Virginia That includes eight chickens. I would like to underscore that I am a cat person who would be happy owning one cat. One to two cats is, to me, the correct number of pets. I do like dogs. I am much more of a dog person now that I have a dog. But they are so much more work than cats. It's not even funny. It's not the same conversation at all. So if I had a different life, I would be a one to two cat person. However, I have a child who is an animal whisperer. Like truly, that is her love language, that is her passion, that is her whole world. And you're supposed to really try to encourage your children's interests. And so somehow, now I have 1000 pets. When the kids were born, we had, at the time, three old man cats that were dying off in their early childhood. And then once we were down to one cat, we got the dog. So we have a Bernedoodle named Penelope. And at that point, in 2020, we also had the dog, a cat named Walter, and a fish tank. And when we divorced, I said, I will keep the dog and Walter the cat who hates the dog will go to their dad's house and the fish tank went to their dad's house too. Oh, I'm sorry we also had a leopard gecko at that point. So I kept the gecko. And I've talked before on the podcast the story of Blue the gecko. I won't go into it now, but Blue the gecko did disappear for a while. So we adopted a second gecko, and now we have two geckos, Blue and Kat. And the dog, Penelope. CorinneWhat is the lifespan of a gecko?Virginia it's like 25 years. It didn't know that when I got a gecko.CorinneAre you kidding me?VirginiaNo. Blue and Kat and I are in it for the long haul. They can live a really long time. But I will say they are very low maintenance pets. When they're not lost in your house, they just sleep in their tanks all day, and you feed them wax worms every couple of days. It's no work. Compared to a dog, it's fine. They're less work than a cat. So for a while, we were a household of just dog and geckos, and then the kids convinced me to adopt two kittens, so we added Licorice and Cheese, our two cats. And Cheese is my favorite of all of the pets. And I tell all the other pets this all the time, because I'm always hoping to inspire them to be more like Cheese. Cheese is the most laid back cat. He's like, You do you. I'm fine. I'll come and curl up next to you, but I'm not in your business. I don't create drama. I don't create interspecies drama. Like Penelope and Licorice are always working stuff out. Cheese is my favorite child. Everyone knows this. And then after we were really at indoor pet capacity, I would say, with the two geckos, the two cats and the dog, Jack, came into our lives, and he really encouraged my 12 year old's passion for chickens, and now we have the eight chickens. CorinneWow. VirginiaAnd the chickens do have names. Let me see if I can do it. Pom Pom, Turkey, Shiva the destroyer, Lord Peanut of Doom, Peggy, Alex, Lily and somebody else. Oh, Thomas J Finnegans. CorinneWill you be getting any other animals. VirginiaNo. CorinneAsk your children.VirginiaI say no, okay, but I cannot with confidence. I mean, for sure, if we have a casualty, there will be a strong argument for replacement. I have held firm on no second dog, because as much as I love Penelope, they are so much work. Dogs are like adding another child to your home. And I don't want that. And I don't think anyone wants another cat, because, I mean, we make Jack do the cat litter now that he's here but none of us were real enthusiastic about litter box cleaning. So that’s the one downside of cats. And for anyone whose kids are pet curious: I don't think reptiles are actually great pets, because they are not very interactive or interesting. This is an unpopular position, but I think if you're inclined to go reptile and you live in a neighborhood where you can do it, chickens are a better option. They are also tiny dinosaurs and you get eggs, and they're more fun and interactive, CorinneThat makes sense. VirginiaAnd it's about the same work wise. They're not a ton of work. Also, just be a cat person, though. I mean, it's fine, nobody needs this many pets. But they do bring us a lot of joy.CorinneAll right. Well, on to the next topic. Question, do I need to buy a sex pillow? Instagram keeps making me think I do not sure if they are size inclusive.VirginiaI think you do. You don't need to buy one off Instagram. But we learned from Brianna Campos, when she came on to do our fat sex episode, that they are definitely size inclusive and, a really good option for fat sex. CorinneI feel like, if you're wondering about it, why not? At the very least, you have something to try out.VirginiaSee if you're into it. I wonder if Instagram keeps sending this person the same one they send me, which is like a very high end linen sex pillow. CorinneOh, wow. VirginiaCalled Tabu. CorinneI'm not getting advertised this. VirginiaWell, you will now. I've been curious about it. I've been, seeing the ads.CorinneI would definitely look into whether it's size inclusive. Maybe see if there are reviews from anyone? Or how strong the foam is? VirginiaAre we worried about it getting flattened? Are we worried about width? Like, you don't want to feel like something's narrow? You don't want it to feel like a yoga block underneath you? So maybe check some measurements. But I think there's got to be some good, fat-friendly sex pillows out there, because the sex wedge is really helpful for working it out with bodies with bellies. It gives you new angles to get to. We say go for it and report back and let us know. CorinneGo for it. VirginiaOkay, I will read the last question: Hi. I am wondering if you find that personal responsibility vis a vis sustainability to be a diet ever? For example, pledging to do something to help the planet in absolute terms. Like, I will never, ever drink bottled water. I will never buy a new article of clothing, etc. It seems blasphemous to say personal responsibility, efforts towards sustainability is a diet, but I'd be curious to hear your and Corinne's thoughts on it. I do think it's great and necessary to take steps to reduce, reuse, recycle, have a smaller footprint, use resources responsibly and sustainably, but sometimes the rigidity of people's rules around this and the moralizing feel familiar to diet culture.CorinneI do think it can be a diet. it's one of those things where you kind of have to find the sweet spot between it feeling like a restrictive diet, and not being so jaded that you do nothing. So it's not being like, I will never, ever drink bottled water, but also not throwing every plastic bottle you encounter in to the landfill.VirginiaI think anytime we're absolute about something, we start to enter into a perfectionist territory, which goes diet-y, fast—if by diet we mean using a set of external rules to judge yourself, setting high standards that are impossible to achieve, and deciding there's an arbitrary standard of goodness by which to measure yourself. Those are all the main components of how Burnt Toast defines a diet. And I can see them showing up here. But it doesn't mean like you're saying that the actual impetus to want to live more sustainably is problematic. I think it's that we are so used to feeling like if we're doing something, there's one right way to do it. That's how we apply a diet lens to this topic. And it's sort of ironic, right? Because the whole goal is to live more sustainably. And there is nothing less sustainable than a diet.CorinneI've definitely, felt this way about the sustainability fashion conversation sometimes where people are, like, "There's absolutely no excuse for shopping from fast fashion brands." VirginiaBudget, accessibility...come on, guys. CorinneHave you ever been a size 26 and needed a pair of pants immediately.Virginia I can think of so many reasons why folks need to shop fast fashion at least sometimes. And I just think anytime we remove the possibility for gray areas we remove the ability for something to be sustainable, I also think a lot of the steps that people take towards sustainability and get really obsessive about doing "one right way" are not necessarily the things we most need to happen to save the planet.What we really need is, big legislative change, industry regulation—all these big things. And it's not to say that personal choices don't matter, but you becoming overly rigid about bottled water is not going to make or break anything. So how is it useful? How is it getting you towards the goal? And at what cost? If we're always kind of moving the goal post on what's enough here, that's not useful. Which is not to say, don't do some of these things. But the absolutism, I see it all the time, and I think a lot people start those projects and are not able to sustain them. And I say this to someone who regularly feels like she's not doing nearly enough for the planet. So I'm not saying I've got to figured it out. There's certainly more I could be doing. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterCorinneWell, I think we made a podcast.VirginiaI think we did that! What's your Butter today?  CorinneOkay, my Butter is something which I also just recommended on Big Undies, but it is called Ponaris, kind of guessing on how you say it. And it is a nasal emollient. So it is like a little glass bottle with a dropper that is filled with oil and minty herbs or something.Virginia Beef tallow. CorinneAnd you drop it up your nose and it immediately drips down the back of your throat and clears everything out. VirginiaOhhhh....so not beef tallow. CorinneIt feels amazing. Someone recommended it on the Big Undies Fall Must Haves. And last week, I just, reached a tipping point where I was like, my legs are scaly. My sinuses are scaly. VirginiaI am becoming a lizard. It's too dry. CorinneIt was like a desert inside of me. And so I ordered a new lotion and some Ponaris. Anyways, apparently it was developed by NASA for astronauts to use in space as. part of their first aid kit. VirginiaOh, my God. Oh, my God. CorinneSo that’s science, if you've ever heard of it. VirginiaIt's good enough for the astronauts noses, guess it's good enough for my nose! CorinneIt's a little bit weird. But I do feel like it's really making a difference.VirginiaWell I totally want to try it. I also totally want to say that this is your second MAHA-adjacent recommendation.CorinneIs this one MAHA? I was thinking this was more like the solar shield. VirginiaWell it's in the woo, woo supplement territory. CorinneOkay, well, yeah.VirginiaWe're getting into ear candling vibes. People are going to be like, I love ear candling.CorinneIs that MAHA?VirginiaI don't know. CorinneI don't know that it is. Ear candling is, crunchy hippie, right?VirginiaBut it's the crunchy hippie that then circles back around to MAHA. I'm just saying, we're concerned and we're tracking. CorinneThank you for your concern. VirginiaWell, to make you feel better, my Butter is also going to be a weird nasal supplement.CorinneOh, amazing. Wow. We did not plan this. VirginiaIt's also perfect because this is the pets episode! Mine is a weird supplement that I'm giving my cats so I won't be allergic to them.CorinneWhoa, does that work?VirginiaI can't believe I'm saying this, but... yes, it seems to be really working. Question Mark?CorinneWhat is it? VirginiaOkay, it's a brand called Pacagen. It's a chicken flavored powder, and you sprinkle a little on the top of your cat's food. And they claim, I guess this too, is science. Question mark? They claim that it changes the protein in your cat saliva, and that's what we're allergic to. And cats lick their fur everywhere. So that's why you react to cat fur. I, despite being an avowed cat person, am allergic to cats. I live in a lot of denial about it, because I love them and wish to have cats, and don't wish to acknowledge the cat allergy that I live with, but I was reaching a point last fall where I was like, I mean, I am definitely, really allergic to my cats. Every time I pet them, my eyes were streaming and, you know, I wake up with a stuffy nose all the time. Is it sleep apnea? Is it cat allergies? Who knows? Anyway, someone on Instagram influenced me to try this because she claimed it totally worked for her. And I was like, whatever, we'll try it. And both Jack and I, within like, two weeks, were like, oh my god, we're really a lot less allergic, and I can pet the cat now and not have an immediate reaction.CorinneWow, that's amazing. VirginiaNow, couple of caveats.It's quite expensive. I'm locked in now, but it's like 60 bucks a month, or something. Like, it's not nothing, especially because I have two cats, so I need to buy, like, multiple things, and itcomes in these little, teeny bottles. Also, my family, who are all much more cat allergic than me, when they visited for Christmas, were like, You're crazy. We're still allergic to your cats. So I don't know what level of allergy severity it works for. I would have described my allergy as mild to moderate. But also I don't know, maybe they were having colds or something. Nasal stuff is very mysterious. It's very hard to nail down what's causing it. So we don't know. But it's working well enough that I'm going to keep buying it for the lifespan of these cats, I guess, and as long as I feel like it's still working. It's something to try, because otherwise I was like, am I at the allergy shot stage? And that felt like a whole big project. I hope this is helpful information for anyone else whose nose is dry and stuffy. You can put oil in it, and you can feed your cat something weird.CorinneAmazing. VirginiaAll right. Thank you all for listening. We would love to know what is new with you and what you're putting in your nose. Take that in whatever direction you want! Tell us in the comments. Make sure to rate and review us in your podcast player and tell friends where they can listen for breaking news about nasal substances. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies. Our producer is Kim Baldwin who also writes The Blonde Mule. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay and it’s time for your January Indulgence Gospel! Today we are talking about former restaurant critic turned diet crusader Pete Wells—and why the New York Times always spends January turning into a women's magazine from hell. CW for discussions of intentional weight loss and lazy fat jokes (from Pete), including some that are offensive to both humans and bassett hounds. You do need to be a paid Just Toast subscriber to listen to this full conversation. Membership starts at just $5 per month!Join Just Toast!Don't want an ongoing commitment? Click "buy for $4!" to listen to just this one.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈

You're listening to Burnt Toast! I'm Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with the one and only Melani Sanders. Melani is a digital creator and the fearless founder of the We Do Not Care movement. If you are a woman in your 40s, 50s and beyond, you are very likely already in this club. Melani's viral club meeting videos, where she runs down a list of everything "We just do not care about anymore," are the kind of thing that my friends are constantly sharing and dropping in our group chats, and I'm sure it's the same for you. Melani perfectly articulates the pressures we're under, and when she names it, it feels easier to let it go. So I loved this conversation. Welcome to the Burnt Toast chapter of the We Do Not Care Club. Let's get this meeting started.If you enjoy this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work!Join Burnt Toast!🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 228 TranscriptMelaniHello and welcome to all members of the We Do Not Care Club. I started this club for all women in perimenopause, menopause and post menopause. We are putting the world on notice that we simply just do not care much anymore. This is a special body liberation edition. Yay.VirginiaI'm so thrilled to have you here. I just love your work, and I'm a huge fan. So thank you for doing this.MelaniThank you for having me. VirginiaWell, you just kind of exploded into all of our lives in the last year. Where did the We Do Not Care Club come from? What's the origin story?MelaniThis was something that happened by chance. I was at Whole Foods in the parking lot. I was waiting on Whole Foods to open up because I was out of ashwagandha. Ashwagandha has been a huge part of my perimenopause journey. It is my prerequisite to life, that and coffee and a few other things. I got to have that. It helps me to feel more stable. I realized I didn't have any more. I woke up, and I keep it on my nightstand, and I turned the bottle over to look for some. And I pulled the cotton stuff out, and I said, 'Oh, crap.' And it was about seven something in the morning. They weren't open until eight. I was in the parking lot when it opened. When I got back in the car, I popped open my ashwagandha. I took the ashwagandha, and I looked at myself in the mirror. I honestly just didn't care much anymore. I didn't comb my hair. Everything was unstructured. I had on a bra that was half the size of my boobs, and it was, it was all out of order. And I didn't care that I didn't care. And I thought, I'd been a creator for a while, for over four years. And I said, 'You know what? Maybe I could start a club called a We Do Not Care Club.' And I hit record and I asked, "Did anyone else out there feel the way that I did, and if so, join me. Join the club." And sure enough, by the time I got home from hitting that record button, my phone was blowing up. It was blowing up. The notifications: "Absolutely, I want to join, I want to join. I want to join." Yeah, I'm in it, I'm in it.And sure enough, my platform grew to maybe about 500,000. The WDNC is at 6 million now, across all platforms. VirginiaUnbelievable.  MelaniI was gaining hundreds of thousands of followers per day. VirginiaOh, my God. How are you? Because that's a huge shift in your life.Melani Yes. In the beginning, I was very scared. I've freely shared emotionally what this is doing for me, mentally, all of it. I'm just openly sharing because I'm just a girl in perimenopause, and I hit record as it was happening. I didn't quite understand it, because when you get new followers, it's like, 'Oh, I got 100 new followers. Yay. That video did well.'But when you look and you're gaining hundreds of thousands of followers per day, it's like, 'What is going on?' I was trying to be sure, like, did something else come up besides this video? But then, typically, I'll post and I’ll post on several platforms at one time, and they were all going viral. They were just going. So it scared me. And honestly, in the beginning I ran because I wasn't the content creator that showed up every day doing a lot of content. Sometimes I don't post for a week or so. VirginiaYou're living your life. MelaniYeah, I'm living my life. I'm not stuck to my phone or to social media. I got very nervous, because look at me running my big mouth. I started a club and now I'm not even all there. I don't even know who I am most days. So how's this going to work out? I think I've migrated from scary to just a bit nervous. You know, this is the internet, and there are so many things that are so out of the box. It's very surreal. Very surreal.VirginiaWell, I feel like it blew up because you voiced something that so many of us are experiencing and didn't know how to voice. It's a good kind of blowing up. You're giving voice to this thing, women's experiences in our 40s and 50s and beyond are not talked about. It's not made visible at all. But I can imagine it's, yeah, coming with quite a cost to you personally. So thank you for your service on behalf of all of us.MelaniWell, thank you. The one thing I do want to add is that I feel as time has gone on, I've felt like I was meant to do this, if that makes sense. As I cry openly. I cut my computer off for a while. I really just examined everything that was going on in the sisterhood, all of the comments like, what do they see? What do they hear? And to your point, just being able to say things out loud. I'm getting stronger in that. But before this happened, balance was something that I really, really, really tried to master, if that makes sense. And just paying attention to Melani and what it is I need. I was on this journey before WDNC started. So now that I'm here, it's like I can apply all of those things that I have been trying to do to make my life better. I'm able to take that and put it into WDNC.VirginiaOne of the themes of your content that resonates with me really deeply, and I think with the Burnt Toast listeners, something we're always talking about is how to let go of perfectionism and these expectations that are put on us as women, as moms, especially around cooking and other domestic labor. One of my favorite entries on the list recently was 'We do not care if we said we were cooking dinner this morning. That was this morning's energy, and this afternoon is different.' And I was like, yes, that is how I feel today. Thank you. MelaniAbsolutely. That was when the coffee was hot.VirginiaDoes naming these specific things that you want to let go of, does that actually help you let go of those expectations for yourself?MelaniYes. The announcements are comprised of me and my thoughts, but also the sisterhood. I take a lot of the content from that. So collectively, if our sisters don't care about that, then we don't care about it either. And yes, it definitely does. What really helps is just we are all high fiving each other, and it's like, like you just said about the kitchen and cooking and all of that. Yeah, it feels good to know I'm not the only one.VirginiaWe're all not cooking dinner tonight.MelaniIf you're hungry, the kitchen's not locked. Figure it out. Figure it out. We got stuff to figure out.VirginiaThe main thing at Burnt Toast that we don't care about is diet culture. We are trying to make peace with the bodies we have now. We are trying not to keep chasing the dreams of the bodies we maybe used to have, or never had, but thought we should have. What are some of your favorite body related things to stop caring about?MelaniOne, and I speak about this in the book, in The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook, is my arms. It's one thing that I have been so… I've kept my arms covered up, no tank tops, for years. I have a 24 year old, and when I when I got pregnant with him, my body stretched out a lot, and I got a ton of stretch marks on my arms, and then I ended up having surgery some years later, under my arm, so I just felt like it just looked bad. And I covered it up for a very long time. And after starting the We Do Not Care Club, I really just started to take inventory to be sure that I'm living up to what I'm saying. And I said, 'You know what? I'm about to go put on one of them tank tops, and I'm going to go to TJ Maxx.' And so I walked into TJ Maxx with my tank top on, and I looked around, and I'm trying to figure out who you know. I know they're looking, they're judging, and nobody really gave a damn about my arms. I'm the one that cared so much. So now it is what it is, darling.VirginiaEverybody deserves to not be hot and sweaty. Tank tops are great. MelaniEspecially in midlife, tank tops are life. You look at how many years--my son is, 24 years old, and I went through all of this time, and it was in that moment where it's like, 'Girl, don't nobody care. You better show your arms.'VirginiaYou have a right to show your arms. It’s just a body. MelaniIt sounds so easy, but mentally for many of us, it's not. We know we will judge ourselves. We're waiting to be judged. We're comparing ourselves, and it's like the hell with all of that. VirginiaIt's true that there are times body things do get commented on. One of mine is the way I gain weight. I get mistaken for pregnant quite often. I carry my weight in my midsection and it's this awkward moment that for years, I was like, 'Oh God, am I going to look pregnant in this dress? Someone's going to say something. It's going to be this weird conversation.' And then I was like, 'Well, that's on them for saying the rude thing to talk about.' If they feel uncomfortable in that moment that is not my problem to worry about. They're the ones commenting on someone's body when they shouldn't be. And that really turned that around for me.MelaniYeah, exactly. The one thing that I really focus on now as I study the sisterhood is empathy. I have this saying, and the saying is, 'If our sister's coochie is dry, then we all have dry coochie.' And it pretty much means that her story is our story, and not everyone has that quick confidence or that ability to just turn it off. You know how some things just come so easy to some people, and it's like, it sounds so good, but then it's discouraging, because it's like, 'Damn, why can't I just let go of these insecurities?'I'm okay with being vulnerable. I'm okay with it. It's fine, although I still do have my insecurities, such as showing my arms. But I think together, just being able to share this stuff, we get stronger together. You know what I was going to do, and I might still do it. I think I'm going to go live and I'm just going to sit up there and show my arms, my under arms. VirginiaI love that. MelaniYou think? Well, seriously, I think I'm going to do that, and then, or maybe I can start a challenge or something, and it's like, post what you're most embarrassed about? And then I'm normalized, yeah, let's not, let's normalize it. How about it? Yeah, wow. I had coffee earlier, so I'll probably just wear out in a little while. But the inspiration is there now. No, seriously.VirginiaWe're recording at 9 A.M. There are a lot of big dreams.MelaniYeah, by 5 P.M., it's like, 'No, not doing it. Get out my face.'VirginiaDon't want to show the internet my arms today. MelaniThat's dumb.VirginiaBut I love the intention behind it. And you're right. I think it's making space for 'we are allowed to show these parts of our bodies and not feel shame' and not downplaying actually how difficult that is in a world that's been throwing us these messages our whole lives. You didn't think of the idea that you should feel bad about your arms, that's a society wide message that you've been fed since you were a little girl. So it is really hard work to stand up against that, and not every day is a day to challenge the patriarchy in that way.MelaniYeah, exactly. No. I was joking, but I do think I am going to do that. I think I'm going to start a challenge, and I think that that's going to be good.VirginiaI think it's a great idea. So you mentioned the book, The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook. Would love to hear a little more about this. The main thing I know is that the dedication is to the asshole who told you you had a computer box booty. So I read that and was like, 'Okay, well, I'm ordering it for everyone I know.'MelaniYeah, that was the intention behind it, for sure. And I wanted to preface it with that, we can have some words in it, but it's a bit of fun. It's what Melani is, and what I'm comprised of is there's a very humorous side to me, there's a very serious side to me, and then there's this educational part to it. So I think that we have to be sure, as we're going through this stage of life, in perimenopause and beyond that we can definitely say what we don't care about, but then we also need to have intention about what we do care about. Let's have fun with it. Let's have fun with it and talk about why we do not care what the back of our hair looks like. It's the front that matters. That's what we can see, and being able to be okay with that. But then, we have to still just kind of pay attention to how that affects us mentally. Like, we do not care if our room is junky, but at some point we want to be able to clean up that room and to dive into it a little bit. So it's just bits and pieces of some fun. Some pieces where it's like, 'Come on, girl, let's get up girlfriend.'And I'm sharing this through my own personal journey, from childhood to where I am now, and how I put over the years, a lot of expectations on myself, and now that I've reached midlife, it's like, as we said, the kitchen is not locked. That was a priority when I was raising a family and trying to be that perfect wife and make sure things are together. Now, it's like, 'Baby, I'm in survival mode. I don't give a damn about what y'all have going on over there right now.'Reprioritizing is where we have to be, and be okay with it. We're at capacity. We're at capacity. Don't add anything else to our plate. If anything, take something off. So that is the gist of The We Do Not Care Club Handbook. VirginiaI think a lot of what you're articulating is this larger inequity. I don't see a man launching a We Do Not Care Club. I don't think they need it in the same way. I don't expect a midlife dad to because he's been getting to say 'we do not care' his whole life.MelaniSince birth.VirginiaRight. He's been allowed to not care. And I think what I love about what you're saying there is, like, we're allowed to say we do not care about these expectations. But we can care about ourselves. We can care about our own values. And it'll benefit us to clean up the room at some point. But doing it because people are coming over and they're going to judge us, that's a different conversation.MelaniThat is exactly what the We Do Not Care Club is. Because we just have to come to a reality, you know, and be honest with ourselves. Because the pressure is real. Nine times out of 10, most things that we're doing in life is like, we do it because of what it looks like or feels like to others versus how it looks or feels to ourselves. Just being able to just migrate to that mindset of not caring if my house looks like this. And you want to come to my house? This is how my house looks. If you have judgment, don't come. But if you want to clean up, go ahead, get the broom. But before this, I would be like, 'Oh no, they're coming over. Let me run and do this, and run and do that.' And it's like, why am I driving myself crazy? Yeah, I'm already not all there sometimes. VirginiaAnd if they're really your friends, they'll come and sit with you with the laundry basket, like they don't care. That's the other power of the sisterhood you're building is we're all saying to each other, 'Oh, wait, you don't care about that either. Oh, great. We don't have to be more expectations on each other.'MelaniThat's right. It feels so good when you can just be around someone and you're not worried about them judging you or comparing yourself to them, or vice versa, and just live. There's such quality in those type of friendships.VirginiaMy group of friends now in my 40s, is just everything. These are the women who, like, have held you through so many hard things in your life, who are like, we're showing up for each other, and especially now in this life stage with parents who are sick and dying, or teenagers going through their big feelings, just all these really, real things. I do not have time to care if my house is perfectly decorated for the holidays.MelaniI'm so happy that you have those friends. I would say that I do, too, but so many of us don't. And hopefully in this sisterhood, we can find that connection with other like-minded sisters. And it's like, 'Hey, you can find your tribe here.'Because we end up - the pressure, the stress of caring so much - many of us internalize that. I was reading about this with suicide. As far as the suicide rate, it's because there are all these bottled up feelings of comparison, rejection, and not being accepted, all of those things. And I just hope that this is opening up the door to be able to be okay with who you are, where you are, and what season you're in. It's okay.VirginiaPart of the expectations game has been that you don't talk about what's really hard, right? Someone asks, 'How you doing?' You say, 'Oh, I'm fine.' 'Oh, hanging in there, you know.' And you don't really get into a real conversation. I think women are taught that we have to protect the marriage, protect the image of the perfect family, to the degree that then we don't let people in when things are hard and that's really dangerous.MelaniIt really can be. It really can be. And like you said, we're the nurturers, we're the protectors. Men are there, and thank you so much, men, but we have to really be the ones to keep it all together. And we're the ones typically that are falling apart.VirginiaIs there anything you've let go of? You talked about the arms. I'm interested if there's any other things that you used to really put pressure on yourself to do that now you're like, 'I've fully stepped back from that.' And 'Wow, I can't believe I used to care so much about that.'MelaniI think I'm a work in progress as it relates to not caring. I think it's more of a reminder, because subconsciously, I think we do a lot of things that we don't even realize that we're doing. Then it's like, once I sit with it, the quieter I become, the more empowered I become, and also the more aware I become. I think with me, body image has definitely been one. And maybe the clothes. I'm not really chic and aesthetic and I'm about to go on this tour. It's like, what am I going to wear? Because I got some jogging suits in there that I could throw on, you know? And I'm okay with that. VirginiaBe comfortable. MelaniYeah, be comfortable. Some things I'm extremely vulnerable. I don't care. But, like I said, subconsciously, I don't even pay attention to some things that I might be a little bit ashamed about, or worrying what people think of. I was trying to think of an example. A lot of it comes around, like, cleanliness around the house. Like, my baseboards. I looked at them the other day, and I'm like, 'Good lord!' And then I kept walking.VirginiaI don't consider the baseboards to be my business. They're on their own journey. MelaniThey are. VirginiaThey are not for me to know what they're doing. MelaniYeah, that's their life. This is our life. VirginiaMy eyes are up here. I'm not down there looking at them.MelaniYeah, stay in your lane. We stay in our lanes. And so that was a lane that I definitely bypassed and kept going because I can't care. One day.VirginiaFair enough. So you're publishing this book in January, and January is honestly, historically, a time of, like, so much caring, right? Like, this is when people are like, I'm going to start the diet, I'm going to start the new workout routine, I'm going to be a perfect, healthy individual and organize every closet. Was that deliberate to publish in January, to give us a little bit of an alternative? It’s like, you're giving us a really useful counter name, right?MelaniThis is going to be real helpful, right? VirginiaYeah, I think people need to hear it in January most of all. No, you don't have to go so hard, like, pace yourself.MelaniYeah, pace yourself. And it's so funny. The word "pace." I started therapy last year and my therapist, she wanted to come up with a word with me. And every session I would go, I go weekly, every session I would go, and I could not come up with that word because a lot of them were so cliche, like "intentional" or "growth," or "finding," whatever it is. But when she came up with the word "pace," I said, 'That's it.' I mean, for sure, this year, I have told myself so many times you have to pace yourself, pace it. So, unintentionally that word is my word. But as it relates to the intention behind the date? Nope. This book got started in June. Harper Collins, they are under the Harvest imprint. They crashed this book. They crashed it. And it's like that, 'We need it. We want it bad. It needs to get out here.' And I was like, 'Okay, I don't know the first thing about writing a book, but I can run my mouth.'VirginiaI'm not surprised they crashed it, having been in book publishing for a long time, I had a feeling that's what happened to you. It makes sense they want to get it out here right now, in this moment where we're having this conversation about your work. But I actually think the January timing is very smart. MelaniYeah, I like that you said that.VirginiaUsually by the end of January, everyone's exhausted because they spent the whole month trying to, like, not eat sugar and not drink any alcohol. I mean, maybe some people should not drink alcohol, but, like, they don't necessarily serve us to put all that pressure and external expectations on ourselves. So for you to be publishing a book that's like, 'Hey, here's another way to go.' I think it's brilliant timing.MelaniI'm so glad. It's funny because I did not put those two together. Yeah, January is definitely the year to start over, new me, new year, new everything's going to be perfect. And then by February, it's like, okay, let's scale that back a little bit. Did I say that?VirginiaJanuary is morning energy.MelaniYeah, right, it is! I like that. January is morning. So, what is February? February, I think around noonish, we're on that decline.VirginiaMarch is dinner, for sure. March is, we're ordering takeout. It's like, oh my god, winter's not over yet. And yeah, this is brutal. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterVirginiaWell, to wrap up Burnt Toast, we have a segment we call butter, which is where we each talk about something we've just been really loving lately. Like, what is buttering your toast right now? And it can be a TV show or a book or something. It can also just be, like, a color I love, or, something funny someone said, like, anything that's brought you a lot of joy recently.MelaniSomething I would say that I'm loving right now is Melani. When this journey first started for me on May the 13th of this year, I was extremely fearful, and I doubted myself, and I said it so many times, 'I'm not enough. I'm not enough.' I had to decide, Melani, if you're not going to be enough, just go sit down. Girl, just go sit down somewhere and be quiet.Or it's like, you know what? Let's dive into this a little bit. And so I've decided that that is what I'm going to do. I'm not used to being at the front of the class. I'm used to being the person that's in the back of the class, or I'll be the one to get things together and definitely put that quality aspect behind it, and to be sure that we meet whatever goal needs to be met. I say I'm the sister that will hold the door for you and grab your pocketbook while you go up on that stage and do your thing. That is me. But I have had to to turn into this to do something different, and I'm being forced to challenge myself. And I wish that I had have had this kind of mindset, or this type of where it wasn't so forced some years ago, because that definitely would have been beneficial for me. What makes me happy now is my mindset towards where I'm going. And you know this sisterhood and collectively how I mean when you go through the comments and you see things, it is the beauty. It's the beauty in high fiving each other. Nobody cares what color you are, what religion you are. What kind of car you drive, what kind of pocketbook you have, what size your waistline is. Who cares? And so it makes me so happy to see that without judgment. So the whole We Do Not Care Club, and I guess myself, and today on this show, actually - it will be the first time that I'm going to give myself my flowers.VirginiaI love that you're giving yourself your flowers. You need them!MelaniI'm going to cry a little bit. I mean, I am really. I am just, no, just really thinking. I'm so thankful. You know, I'm thankful, and I'm understanding my value more. But I'm frustrated a little, just because it took me being forced into the situation. And it's like, damn, I'm 45 you know? If I had to do this at 30? So I pray that younger generations like have that. You don't necessarily have to be forced in situations, you know? If you have that inner feeling or whatever, bring it out girl. Go stand at the front. When you're in the back, get out the back. Go get on that stage. Speak up. Speak up. VirginiaYou don't always have to be the one who organizes behind. Yes, you actually get to have the moment too.MelaniYes, have that moment. And so I'm going to embrace this time. I'm going to do it scared.VirginiaI just think, like, on behalf of everyone who admires you so much and feels like you've given us this gift. We want you to have this moment. Enjoy it. Like, enjoy it for all of us. You know, because you deserve it, and you've really created something super special that we really needed, so thank you.MelaniI'm curious to hear yours.VirginiaWell, I've just been thinking because I was coming to talk to you, and thinking about again, about the sisterhood and the power of all of this. I've given this one in the past on the podcast, but I'm going to give it again to my book club, which is my kind of core group of ladies. We just had book club last night, and one of our members, her mom just passed, and she was coming back from the celebration of life for her mom, and it just felt so good that we could be there to welcome her back with a lot of cheese and a cocktail. Because that's what she needed. It’s been a time, and that we could all like, be together. So I think female friendship - your best friends in your 40s, which is, I'm lucky to have a whole, tier of those people. MelaniYes. And preferably within the sisterhood, the WDNC sisterhood, the bigger this movement becomes. I want to see us everywhere. In different rooms together. And as long as you hear WDNC, you know that this door is open and you can walk through it and you will not be judged.We're all in this together. We're like I said, 'If our sister's coochie is dry, then we all have dry coochie.' It's her story. It's our story. We're in it together.VirginiaYes, I love that. Well, Melani, thank you so much. This was an incredible conversation. I'm so glad to have gotten to, yeah, get to know you and talk with you.MelaniAbsolutely. This was definitely an honor to even you know just everything that's happening, but to even be able to sit here with you, I definitely appreciate it, and I feel empowered like what you got a little magic power over here on Burnt Toast. What is that about? Good Lord.VirginiaThe Burnt Toast is where we're a small group, but we yeah -MelaniYeah, small but mighty, right? And any ideas or anything within the sisterhood? I want to welcome ideas. This is only the beginning. So if you have ideas, sisters, the We Do Not Care, Club dot com, there are going to be places where you can go and just put your ideas in. I'm having teams being built right now because I want all of us to be - just feel heard. Yeah, so, and I'm trying. I am trying my darndest. VirginiaAwesome. Well, we are rooting for you, and everyone needs to go get the book, The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook. And if you're not already following Melani in all the places, obviously, make sure you do that too.MelaniAt (@) Just being Melani. "Just being Melani" across all platforms.Thanks for listening to Burnt Toast. If you enjoyed the conversation, please support our work with a paid subscription. They start at just $5 a month, and you'll keep Burnt Toast an ad and sponsor free space. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/virginiasolesmith/join.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!