Can I Have Another Snack?

This week on the CIHAS pod, we’re switching things up. I’m joined by Jeanette Thompson Wesson (AKA The Mindset Nutritionist), a fat positive nutritionist who supports people to heal their relationship with food and their body. Jeanette and I will be answering some listener questions, and you lot really came through and asked some great questions, so let’s get into it! Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Jeanette’s work here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to my newsletter here. And I think that's where fat liberation really can come in because, you know, everyone's trying to carve out their own space for them. Whereas actually body liberation and, and fat liberation is all about widening that lens to other people. We are not just trying to carve out the space for ourselves individually.We're trying to carve out spaces and take up space in a way that honors other people's space that they're taking up as well and uplifting the bodies that are the most marginalized and going, okay, these are the people who need this space and we want them to have this space. They deserve unconditionally to have this space as well.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome back to Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an Anti Diet registered nutritionist, an author of the Can I Have Another snack newsletter. Just a very quick reminder before we get to today's episode that for the month of March I'm running a sale on Can I Have Another Snack paid subscribers to celebrate our half birthday.If you sign up now, you get 20% off, either a monthly or annual subscription. This is a really good deal and I won't be offering it again this year. So head to laurathomas.substack.com to sign up. You get to join in our weekly community discussion threads plus bonus podcast episodes, twice monthly essays, including my Dear Laura column, and more importantly, you're helping making this work possible. And if for any reason you can't afford a subscription right now, you can email [email protected] and put the word “snax” in the header and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription. No questions asked. So today I am joined by the wonderful Jeanette Thompson Wesson, and we are gonna be answering listener questions that you've sent in, and there are some really great questions, but if you don't already know Jeanette, she is a fat positive nutritionist who supports people to heal their relationship with food and their body.And if you want to know more about Jeanette, then I really recommend listening to the episode of Don't Salt My Game that we did together last summer, I'll link to it in the show notes. So go check that out. And how this is gonna work is that we're gonna take it in turns to ask questions and then kind of bounce off of each other to come up with answers.All right, Jeanette, are you ready?Jeanette: I am ready. Should we get into it?Laura: Let's do it. MAIN EPISODELaura: So you're gonna start off with the first question and yeah, let's see where it goes.Jeanette: So here is your first question from Ger. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the connection between diet mentality and gut problems with constipation.Laura: Okay, so Janette and I just had a little back and forth about what exactly this question was getting at, because I think what they're asking is if there is a physiological response in terms of our digestion based on the way we think about food and our relationship with food.Jeanette: Yeah.Laura: And so I think that's my understanding of the question, but just in case, and maybe wanna take a step back and think about what happens.To our gastrointestinal tract when we go on a diet, right? So whether it is, you know, your run of the mill, everyday diet, like a Slimming World or Weight Watchers or whatever, or whether it's, you know, more severe disordered eating or an eating disorder, basically the same thing happens in all of those cases.It's just the degree to which it happens gets more intense, gets worse, the more severe the problems around eating are. So what we could expect to happen is because the total amount of energy available to the body is not enough to support all its basic functioning. A lot of those basic processes like menstruation, like digestion, all of these things that are considered inverted commas non-essential, they slow down so that there's enough energy to divert towards essential functions like primarily your brain. Right? So what happens in our digestive tract is that we have, Jeanette's gonna love how nerdy I'm gonna get, we have what's called delayed gastric emptying. So the contents of our stomach literally emptying, slows down. It's sometimes called, when it gets really severe, it's called gastroparesis, where it's almost like this partial paralysis of the stomach so that contents don't, from the stomach, don't get properly turned around in the stomach.And then when the, and then it's the release into our small, our small intestine is a lot slower. So you get, you have this feeling of fullness for a lot longer after eating a meal. And you might also fill up relatively quickly or feel, feel full quite quickly after eating. What happens in our guts, so in our small, in our small intestine primarily is we have slowed peristalsis.So peristalsis is the action of, um, the muscles along our gastrointestinal tract contracting and pushing food through our guts, right? And basically because there's less, there's less energy available to the body, that process slows down.That's why you get constipated or you might get mixed i b s type symptoms where you alternate between constipation and diarrhea. So that is effectively what is going on in your gastrointestinal tract when you restrict. And it's also why we say a lot in eating disorder recovery and, and when we're working with people with disorder eating, is that the best way to heal your gut is not through going on some sort of low FODMAP diet or some leaky gut protocol or whatever other bullshit is out there, is it's actually having regular, consistent, adequate nutrition and nourishing your body. That's what heals any gut related issues. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't in some cases where people maybe have intolerances or other, you know, have to be mindful of, of what they're eating for other medical reasons, but that broadly speaking, that unless we have enough energy on board and we're eating regularly, then it just sends our guts kind of haywire.Right. Would you have anything to add to that, Jeanette?Jeanette: I mean, have a lot of clients who have experienced that and also I have a lot of personal experience with that. When I did Slimming World, I was, I mean, too much information, I'm gonna say anyway, I was really badly, like really badly constipated, and I knew exactly what was going on in my body. Even as a nutritionist, I was like, I know what's happening.I know exactly why I am constipated right now, and still chose to obviously do what I was doing because of my own internalised fatphobia, because I was working from a place where I thought I had to be thinner.Laura: Mm-hmm.Jeanette: And what it was at the time. And it's, it's really quite, it's really quite horrible to be in that place where you are like, oh my goodness, my body should be doing this. And it doesn't feel comfortable. And but when you really think about it and you tear everything, like you strip everything back, how amazing is our body to basically put ourselves in these like survival modes really?Laura: Mm-hmm.Jeanette: Because actually if we didn't have that delay within our body, um, how would we actually be feeling within ourselves without, with our hunger hormones and stuff, if we didn't have that delay, we'd actually be feeling probably quite ill, reallyLaura: Mm-hmm.Jeanette: Even worse, even more miserable than what we've been, we would, would be feeling.And I think that's the thing that kind of blows my mind with all of these biological processes that go, goes on, is that we forget that when we're actually dieting, we are putting our body in that place of restriction, which our body doesn't actually realize that that's intentional. I mean, it's clever, but it doesn't realize that we are actually choosing to do that.It just goes, oh my goodness, like, what is happening? We are not getting, you know, what, we, we should be getting into our body and these things happen. So it just blows my mind. It's, it's, I always love it. I'm a science nerd myself. So , it's enjoyable.Laura: There's something else that I wanna talk about here, which is what I wonder if the question was kind of getting at, so I've, I feel like I've maybe answered a different question, but I just wanted to give that context because I'm sure a lot of people will wonder like, okay, well what is actually happening inside my body as I'm restricting?Right. Whether it's, like you say through, you know, like legitimate food scarcity in, you know, if someone is food insecure, or you know, from a evolutionary perspective, if there just wasn't enough food around, right? That's why this, this process is there in, in the first place, right? Conservation of the species.But then there's the other side of things, which is this voluntary, and we could argue if it's voluntary or not under diet culture, but you know, like putting ourselves on a diet. What is that doing, both from a physiological perspective, but what is the diet mentality? So just the kind of mindset of restricting ourselves.What does that do to our digestion? And I think this is, I don't know specifically of any literature that connects both of those dots quite as clearly, but I do know that there is something called the nocebo effect. So the effect is essentially the inverse of the placebo effect. So if I tell you this pill has like magic qualities and it's gonna make you feel amazing and you take the pill, you're gonna start feeling amazing.That's the placebo effect. But equally, if I tell you that gluten in your food or like y you know, milk, protein, strawberries, and it could be literally anything if I tell you that that's bad for you, even though it doesn't cause a, you know, even though there's no physiological basis for, um, you to have a reaction to that food, the nocebo effect means that you do have a very real response to that food.Not because there's something, you know, kind of defective in your digestion, but because of the gut brain access and the connection between our brains and our guts. And so that can have major impacts on digestion. And there are studies that have shown that people were given, so there were two groups. They all had self-described lactose intolerance. Both groups were given sugar pills. One group were told that the pills had lactose in them. The other group were told that they didn't have lactose in them.And of course the group that were told that they had lactose in the pills had a physiological response. So they reported increased bouts of diarrhea and constipation. Right. Versus the group that were told that it was just sugar pills, even though they were all receiving sugar pills. But it shows you that there's a real strong physiological impact on our digestion just because the seed has been planted in our brains, which is, that blows my mind that that's even a Jeanette: It's crazy, isn't it? I see There are a lot with people who, um, go for like allergy testing. You know, the kind of ones where you can send like something off on the internet or I don't know, one of, one of those kind of pay 50 pounds and we'll give you a list of all these random things that we think that you are intolerant or allergic to, and you get this list back and they're like, oh my God, how many things are am I supposed to be intolerant to?And you know, people start restricting these things and having exactly the same reaction that you, you know, you said, you know, actually I feel so much better without these being in my body. And when I do have a strawberry, like one of the interesting things is like strawberry comes up quite a lot in my experience when I do eat a strawberry.Oh, I feel awful. I have like diarrhea and this happens and that happens. And, and I think that that gut brain axis is, is so incredibly powerful. And then one of the other things it kind of like takes me to when we are dieting as well, dieting is incredibly stressful. Like really, really stressful.And um, it also makes us feel very miserable. And then when you are coming up to weigh in day, the anxiety, the nervousness of of have I lost weight? Have I not lost weight? And actually having to stand on a scale, the gut-brain axis as well, like axis can actually have a big impact there as well. And cause that constipation and, you know, having diarrhea as well because of that really strong reaction you can have to just actually being on the diet and the men mentality that comes with being on the diet as well.And we, I think we forget about that mental link that we have.Laura: Mm-hmm. . And there are studies that show that that dieting increases your cortisol levels. Right. So your stress, stress hormone. So although there, so I guess what we're saying is, although there's no like, like single study I can point to, there are lots of potential mechanisms by which like, The thought of going on a diet and people know themselves, right?Like how many times have you thought, okay, like diet starts tomorrow, therefore I have to like, eat everything in the cupboards right now. What impact do we think that's gonna have on our digestion if we just like flood our bodies with, with more food than it can handle in one go? Like of course that's gonna have an impact on your, on your digestion.So, okay. Should we head on to the second question?Jeanette: Let'sLaura: This is a question for you Jeanette. This is um, from Monica, and I think it will become clear why I wanted to ask you this question. So, Monica says, I began intuitive eating a few months ago after years and years of heavy restricting and recovering from an eating disorder.I've had problems feeling the fullness and hunger cues, but I feel like I now manage it. Not perfectly, but Okay. And I try not to get too hung up on it. What I most struggle with is noticing my hunger and eating properly during my workday. I work as a teacher and many days I do not have a proper break, maybe like 10 to 15 minutes in total.I'm also often really stressed during the day, and I end up snacking the whole day. Every time I have five minutes by myself at my desk, and I end up never feeling hungry and never feeling satisfied either. Do you have some tips for intuitive eating at work? At home when I manage my time, it's a lot easier.So yeah. Monica, the question totally makes sense and I wanted to ask you that because up until pretty recently you were a teacher. So, what are your thoughts reading this question?Jeanette: My thoughts are like, my heart goes out to you because obviously we know at the moment and just in general that teaching is an incredibly stressful career to be in and you very, very rarely have time to slow down. So I completely understand where actually you say that you can kind of pick up your hunger and fullness cues not perfectly, and not being hung up on that, but then also eating throughout the day as well.I mean, it's no wonder really that you eat the way that you eat because of school. Because like with teaching, you have such little time to yourself and I want to say how important it is to think of intuitive eating as an like, not as like hard and fast rules, cuz we don't want to be approaching intuitive eating like a diet and actually coming from place of imperfection is completely fine, especially in the space that you're in at the.Coming from the teacher point of view as well, I would ask you, is there any way you can try and carve out some time and space during the day, during your break times and your lunch times where you can really take some time out? Is there somewhere you can go to eat that serves you? You know, have you got an office? Have you got a a, a place away for your desk? I think is one of the important things because when we are sitting at a desk and we're trying to do a thousand of one things at the same time as a teacher, we are checking the emails. We are trying to do a detention. We've got kids in front of us. We're trying to answer things. We're trying to create resources. We're trying to lesson plan all throughout our lunchtimes as well. And we don't have that chance to sit back and really have a listen to ourselves and being able to honor our hunger, which is why it makes complete sense why you are going to be eating and snacking throughout the day and that eating and that snacking throughout the day. Also wanna say how normal, that normal that is and how, you know, in the stress of that job job, if you are eating that as almost like an emotional regulator during the day, that is also completely valid to be doing as well. Because if you are in that moment and you are feeling that stress and it's a long time to be under stress from whenever you, you know, head to work like 7 30, 8 and end up leaving like 5, 5 30, then you know you've got loads of work to do in the evening.You know, you've got that anticipation as well. And we also don't have time, with time poor people as teachers, we don't have enough time to be able to be checking in on ourselves and we don't have enough time to be put in other coping mechanisms in place that would actually be really healthy things for us to have in place as teachers as well.Laura: Hmm. Jeanette: I would say at this at the moment, if there's nothing you can change, in the teaching role that you're in right now, to be able to carve out that time away from your desk to be able to honor that hunger when you can honor that hunger is to understand that coming from imperfection in intuitive vision is perfectly fine.And know that hopefully sometimes soon you will be able to listen to those internal cues in a much better way. Maybe when there's less pressure, maybe, um, if and when you want to make a change to the role that you have as well. And also to know that following intuitive eating during your time away from work is also just as important as well, and being able to take that time to honor yourself then,Laura: Yeah. I'm really glad that you said that. You know what you're doing is fine.like if that's what you need to do to get through the day and survive, it's okay that, you know, for you intuitive eating doesn't look like, you know, three perfect meals and however many snacks a day that it, it just means putting something in your mouth when you can Jeanette: Which is intuitive. Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes like if it feels better than just drop the label intuitive eating. Right. Because, you know, I think that we associate intuitive eating with looking a particular way Jeanette: Oh my Laura: And yeah. And it doesn't have to be perfect. So, you know, how can, how can you maybe bring a little bit more acceptance to, you know, if you, like you say, if you can't change anything, which like, I feel like if she could, she probably would've by nowJeanette: Exactly. It's hard. It's hard to do that.Laura: So. Yeah. You know, like, how can you maybe even bring a bit more self-compassion to that of like, well, fuck, this is hard and teaching is a really hard job and I have a lot of other pressures, so I don't need to put more pressure on feeding myself. I can just let it be what it is for now. And you know, if it, if it's, I, I appreciate that like, you are not really ever feeling hungry, but never feeling satisfied either. And if that feels like it's more of a problem, then, you know, taking a look at like, what, what are you bringing with you, right? What is it that you know is gonna help you feel more satisfied with what you're eating? So is it that you need to bring a bit more balance to what you've got there?Like have, I don't know, a bit more protein or a bit more carbohydrates or something to help power you through the next like, set of lessons or, or whatever is, do you have, like, I'm thinking, is there anything practical that you can think of, Jeanette, in terms of like helping this person feel a bit more satisfied with what they're eating?Jeanette: I would say what I see from teachers is bring more, have a, I always used to have a whole draw in my desk, literally dedicated to snacks. Because we are up so early in the morning, um, I, you know, I, I have children as well that had to sort out in the morning, so my priority wasn't actually making sure I had enough snacks in my bag when I got to school.So I actually just went out and I'd go out every couple of weeks and I'd buy so many long life snacks that I could just keep in there. And that was a mixture of a whole load of things. It was a mixture of cereal bars and little packets of raisins and nuts and also chocolate and caramel buttons and Oreos.And so just literally have that all available to me. And it was literally in my desk so I could just snack as I went to, like as I went along the day. And that was a really helpful thing for me to put in place for myself as well as bringing a really big bottle of water. Cuz otherwise I would just not drink anything. I just didn't have any time to.Laura: Oh yeah. I think getting, like having a snack drawer. And I was thinking as you were saying, like, I think you said pretzels maybe, and I was like, oh yeah. Like something crunchy. Something that's gonna give you, you know, thinking about like your sensory, like what's going to make help you feel satisfied from a sensory perspective?Is it that you need, you know, something like crisp and crunchy or do you prefer something chewy and soft or you know, what is it that will help you feel satisfied even, you know, with that five minute little snack session that you can have? So, yeah, hopefully Monica, that gives you some ideas to think about.All right. Shall we do this next question? What have we got?Jeanette: Okay. My sister-in-law is, to my mind, extremely extra about her kid, currently two and sugar, whereas we take much more relaxed approach with ours currently. For example, we rent out for coffee last weekend. Both sets of parents and kiddos, they had a massive slice of cheesecake, of which their small was allowed a thumb size piece. Well, that's really sad. While they ate the rest, whilst they ate the rest, we merely let our get stuck into our banana bread and chocolate chips. As they get older what's the best way to explain this disparity in attitudes to our kiddo? And how do we handle it with our nephew if he's, if you ask why his cousin can eat what he wants when he isn't allowed? Oh.Laura: This is so heartbreaking for this little nephew. And I also wanna say like, from this parent's perspective, I get it in a similar boat in terms of like how we feed our family compared to how other families around us feed their kids. And like right now, you know, when they're little, when they're toddlers, it like they don't notice, right?But as they get older, they start to think more and more, they'll start to ask more questions, and you're gonna have to figure out how, how to navigate this. But I also think this is a really interesting place that you could talk about differences and how differences are okay, and that we're all different.And sort of thinking about how we can tolerate differences between ourselves and other people. Because yeah, I feel like the more tolerant we are of other people's differences, like the better we will be just as a society, you know? I think it really depends a lot, you know, how you approach this depends a lot on how, on how much time you feel like you're gonna be spending with them.Like if you're gonna be hanging out most weekends, then it, I wonder if it might be, helpful to have a conversation with your sister-in-law, and say like, this is how we approach food, and I know that this isn't how you do things, but how can we navigate this together? Like can we come up with like an approach that works for both of us or that we can, that we both feel comfortable with?And, and I think that with, yeah, like I said, with your kid, I mean, first of all, your nephew is gonna wanna hang out at your house all the time. If you're like , you know, if you've got the goods, then you know, I think they're, they're gonna be kind of excited about that. I wanna hang out with you all the time, but, but yeah, like how, having those conversations with your kids about how everyone eats differently and that's okay.And, but also maybe as they get older and start asking more questions, like being really curious with them, of like, oh yeah, what do you, yeah. Did you notice that you know, little Charlie can only have two chocolate buttons. What did you think about that? Like, how did you feel? How would you feel if I said that you could only have two chocolate buttons and, and just like get yeah, get them to think about it with you a little bit. What do you think Jeanette?Jeanette: I think well exactly the same. You know, I don't navigate things exactly the same way. You have said, I mean, I've got a six year old who, um, has come back from school and um, you know, asked me like very similar questions, how come I can eat this? And I have this for snacks, but actually my friend so-and-so says that she's not allowed snacks or she's only allowed fruit for a snack and that kind of thing.And I very much like to promote having a really nice talk about it and obviously a nice like age appropriate one and going, okay, well it's because, and having a really lovely, like, chat about it for however her attention span last loss in that moment.Laura: And what does what, what kind of things does your six year old say about, about this? What do they come up with?Jeanette: Um, she looks confused a lot of the time, but not with what I say, as in, I'll kind of turn things on. So, a recent one was, um, one of the, one of her friends isn't allowed to have chocolate at the moment because her mom's not allowed to have chocolate in the house because she's not eating chocolate at the moment because she's on a diet. And she was like, but why, um, why isn't she allowed to have chocolate? And I was like, whoa. Laura: Why isn't she? Yeah.  Jeanette: You, you tell me. And she kind of sits there like scratching her head and she was like, but chocolate's not bad, is it? And I was like, no, because, because she's come back previously saying, is chocolate bad for me?Because that's what school had taught them. And I'd obviously have a conversation neutralizing that as, you know, as we do. And um, and she was like, so it's not bad. And I was like, well, no. How do you feel about chocolate? And she was like, well, it makes me feel, and I think she literally put her arms out. It makes me feel wonderful and put her arms out like this.You can't see when you're listening to it, but my arms areLaura: Jeanette's got her arms up above her head hearing. Jeanette: me feel wonderful. And then she said that she felt really sad for her friend that she couldn't have that same wonderful feeling.Laura: And that like, that's it. Is that if we can get our, like we don't need to tell our kids what to think.Jeanette: Yeah.Laura: Because we can get them to tap into that embodied experience of like, and there's research that shows this as well, that like, kids understand how foods feel in their body and that's how they make sense of their world, is that embodied experience.And so if you can help them, you know, instead of like reflexively being like, oh, well that's ridiculous, why would they think that or do that? Like just probing them and, and getting them to connect with, you know, what feels right and true for them. I feel like that's the best that we can do with thisJeanette: They're so good at it as well. And I think because we've dieted, because we've internalized all these messaging about diets and how food is good and bad as when you start children off really young with just allowing them Laura: mm-hmm. Jeanette: listen to themselves and how they feel. What I've been like, my, my six year old also came out.She really likes iceberg lettuce. Loves it. And I was like, so what? What about the lettuce? Do you really love? And she literally got up from her table and started kind of like dancing. And she was like, it makes me feel like I want to do this cuz it's really crunchy and I really like it cause it's crunchy.And she had like a bit of a jig and I love that because I was like, that sounds like it makes you feel really happy and really joyous. And she was like, yeah, it does. And to be able to have that communication with her body, to be able to know that that's how that food makes her feel. And obviously she has food that doesn't make her feel good.And sometimes she'll say to me, oh, what was it the other day that made her feel sad? I think it was mashed potato or something. She was, I did some lazy mash which had like, I leave the skins of the potatoLaura: Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Jeanette: And she really didn't enjoy the sensory quality of having the potato skins in with the mash.Laura: Would be mad at you for that too.Jeanette: Sorry. It was just really lazy and she said it how sad it made her feel and she really did look really sad about this mashed potato. And obviously she didn't have to eat it becauseLaura: Yeah. You don't, you don't force Jeanette: Her. Yeah.Laura: I was thinking about this last night actually. So we had dinner last night and I, Avery had asked for some chocolate, um, with dinner. And so I put. We have like lots of Easter eggs in at the moment because we're just normalizing Easter over here.Easter chocolate. Um, so I put one out on his tray and he had like some fruit and I think he had like some frozen mango and like blueberries and he had like, like the main that we were having and he ate all of his main and he didn't touch his fruit and he didn't touch his chocolate. And at first my mind went to like, oh, that's interesting.He didn't eat his chocolate. It's like, you know his, he's listening to himself, right? Something in him made him listen to himself and think, oh, you know, he didn't want his chocolate. But something also made him listen to himself and say, I don't want my fruit. And I think we often, it made me think about how are more willing to trust our kids when they don't eat the, the so-called bad food according to diet culture. But if they don't want the, you know, the more healthy inverted commas, food, like fruit or their veggies, we are so much quicker to dismiss their experiences. And, and I just thought about that double standard is in absolutely no way related to this question, but I just like, yeah. I don't know. Mm-hmm.Jeanette: I've experienced exactly the same and yeah. It is so much easier, isn't it, to kind of, yeah. no, I'm really like that, pointing that out. Definitely. Yeah.Laura: All right. where are we up to with these questions? Okay. I have a question for you, Jeanette, from Louisa. And just a little content warning here. I'm gonna use the wording that, um, Louisa has put, and it involves the O word, so just skip past this bit if you don't wanna hear that. But Louisa says, I'm overweight, and then she says, I'm not sure best how best to describe myself. My dad was overweight before he died at 65 of heart disease. Are there things I can read slash learn about generational approaches to weight and emotional eating slash being happy in your body, which my dad wasn't. Thanks. So I feel like there's a lot to unpack in this question. Jeanette, where do we start?Jeanette: I'd like to start with, I'm so sorry to hear about your dad and, you know, 65 is actually a really young age at the moment, isn't it? So I can totally understand any fear that has really come from your dad, you know, passing away at this age from heart disease as well. I mean, I'm sure that your brain has automatically gone to, oh my goodness, my weight.What am I eating? Am I eating too much fat, too much salt, you know, am I healthy enough? You know, what can I do within my control? Like, what can I do? And I want to add that because you've actually named yourself as overweight and you know, BMI is like awful. We know that BMI is awful.We know that BMI is a really terrible way to, um, for the healthcare professionals to say how, whether they're assuming someone is healthy or unhealthy, whereas a chart with some numbers can't accurately name us as unhealthy or healthy or accurately say, and what kind of risk we have in our bodies as well, because it's really putting fatness and health kind of together and kind of connecting that together.So I'm going to kind of take that you feel that you are overweight. I don't know if you are in a large body yourself because BMI scale and the size or the level of fatness that you're at, they don't go together. But I know we can talk about a lot of internalized fatphobia and anti-fat in relation to this as well.Laura: Mm.Jeanette: We know that regardless of our weight, we can have healthy behaviors that can really. be protective towards us, can really support our health and support our heart heart's health. None of that means that it's a guarantee, but it means that we can feel supportive um, regardless of what we do in with the size of our body, we know that we don't have the diet to actually reduce our risk of any cardiovascular disease and any, any problems with that.And really good things to read around that is really having a look at, uh, The Fat Doctor UK and their Twitter and their posts as well are really good. Um, who else? Ragen as well. Um, you'll have to put these things in these showLaura: I'll link to it. So Ragen Chastain has a great, uh, newsletter called, um, Weight and Healthcare, and it's basically how to approach the healthcare system in a weight inclusive way. So she unpacks things like you were saying about how BMI is really not a helpful measure of our health. It's just a way of like categorizing bodies and gatekeeping healthcare, which is so fucked up when you think about it.Um, I would also say Aubrey Gordon’s work might be a good place to, yeah, so Aubrey has two books, which I will link to in the show notes. So one of them is called What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, and the other one that just came out, um, like a month or so ago is, um, You Just Need to Lose Weight and Other Myths.So I would start there in terms of like an accessible place to learn about internalized weight stigma, medical fat phobia, anti-fat bias in general. I also wanted to offer, you don't say this explicitly but I wondered as well about you know, if what part of what you're looking for here is something around how you can care for yourself and pre prevent, or, I don't wanna say prevent ill health because we also know that a lot of this is out of our control.A lot of our health is determined by the social determinants of health as well as things like our genetics. Um, but what can you do to care for yourself in a weight inclusive, non diet way? And there are things that you can do, like you alluded to Jeanette around how we care for ourselves.And I wanna say as well that you're not obligated to be healthy, but I also understand why you might wanna find things that help you feel better and, and care for yourself. So I wanted to offer that we put together a Weight Inclusive Guide to Dyslipidemia or elevated blood cholesterol.And so if that is something that you're navigating, then that might be a helpful guide because it talks about supportive behaviors and in a kind of like more holistic way than just like lose weight, go on a diet. So I'll link to that in a show notes too. But I think like something for me that that kind of came up was like this idea of not, not sure how best to describe myself.And I wondered if we should like, talk a little bit about language and you know, how we kind of. Yeah. The language that we use around, around fat bodies, like this is something that we were talking before we started recording, and it's like, it's something that I grapple with a lot because like, technically according to my BMI I am the O word, right?And, but at the same time, I'm straight size, right? I can go into most clothes shops and be able to find something, um, I can fit into, you know, normal, not normal. What am I trying to say? I can fit into plane seats without worrying about, um, being really uncomfortable. Like, I don't have to think about access.But at the same time, there are, you know, real material things that I have to navigate. Like, you know, the example that I was giving you that I said to you earlier is like, if I were to get pregnant, I would be obese at my booking appointment, and that would have implications for the type of care that I was, and the type of birth that I was entitled to.And my maternity pathway would be completely different because of that. So there's this, it is kind of, I suppose what I'm grappling with is, you know, the loss of privilege as your body gets bigger while still having a fuck ton of thin privilege. I don't even know if that what my point was there, but what did it bring up for you?Jeanette: For me, it brings up a lot about the conversation to do with mid-size.Laura: Mid-size? Yeah.Jeanette: Yeah. That's what it kind of brings up because you Laura: Do you wanna explain that?Jeanette: Yeah, so mid-size is something that people tend to use and they use it in. This is the thing, this is the tricky thing that I find with mid-size because I find that it, it can be useful and could be useful for a lot of people, but I also feel like it is used for some people to distance themselves away from fatness.So it may be used by people who maybe small fats. So small fats are generally people who, who are like a 18 to 20Laura: So that's like a UK 18 to 20. Yeah. CauseJeanette: A UK.Laura: Most of our listeners are in the US, which I find it really weird, but that whatever. Yeah. So UK 18 to 20 Jeanette: Yes. I'm Laura: Would be. Jeanette: Would be for us, but a UK 18 to 20 a roundabouts. And it's, you know, when we're talking about small fat, we're talking about a person in a body who's just beginning to experience a lot more. Um, well experience quite a big loss of, um, body privilege, but not quite enough that they still, that, you know, they still fit in society.It's just that it's uncomfortable to fit in society. Then you have mid fat, which is, it's more uncomfortable, you know, you, you can fit into most seats, but you might end up, um, getting bruises from them and then you get super fat which is probably won't be able to fit in some of the seats. And you will be getting bruises.You will be hurting from sitting in, you know, so we have this kind of level of body privilege we can talk about. And some mid-size people use the term mid-size to distance themselves because of their own internalized fat phobia from calling themselves a small fat or identifying as fatness. But then also we have a group of people who potentially, you know, like you were saying, who are potentially are still experiencing some form of anti-fat really, and because of the BMI scale and that kind of thing, but aren't fat, but aren't straight sized.So they're trying to carve out a space for them in like a community way to try. But it, it's really difficult I think, and I think it's difficult to find that space, which is why I'm very much of the opinion of you. We need to try and find a way that is honouring our fattest people and trying to find equity and you know, lift up our fattest people whilst at the same time recognizing that there are people who are in smaller bodies who are still experiencing some form of anti-fat as well.Laura: Yeah. And I think there were a couple of different things that you talked about there, Janette, that I just wanna like go back to. So when you use the terms small fats, mid fat, large fat, and then super fat and infini fat, you're talking about what is often referred to as like fat degrees or the fat spectrum, right?And so what that names is how, as our body size gets bigger, we lose more and more privilege and become further and further marginalized.And, Linda from, uh, fluffy Kitten Party has done a great explainer on categories and it would be, I think it's a really helpful resource if this is new to you, like how do you, like what language do we use to describe our bodies?The midsize thing is a whole fucking trip, where I think like in its original inception, it was this really important kind of bridge for people between who were at the top end of the straight size spectrum. So maybe like a 16 to 18Jeanette: Yeah.Laura: Who or like the bottom size of the plus size spectrum when it comes to like, clothing, let's say. Because I think that really the mid-size thing is about clothing a lot of times. And like how it can be, you know, it can be really tricky if, if you're in that spot to like, do I try and shop in straight size stores where it might not quite fit, but then the plus size stuff doesn't always fit either.So like it can be a tricky space to be in and you still have a fuck ton of body privilege. Right. And then, but what it feels like has happened is that like objectively straight size people, like people who are like a UK size 12 have co-opted this term.Jeanette: Mm-hmm.Laura: And just because they're not like stick thin, they are like, oh, they're like, it's, yeah. It's kind of, they're using it to, to, to kind of like take up space basically, when actually they're just like a fraction away from the idealJeanette: Yeah.Laura: and they're still comparing themselves to that thin ideal. And that's where I think the problem is.Jeanette: Yeah. And that's the problem of society, isn't it? That's the problem that if we are not conforming to this really quite strict view of, you know, thinness and beauty, then you know, you've, we've got a whole load of different people trying to find community in the way that best fits them.And I think that's where fat liberation really can come in because, you know, everyone's trying to carve out their own space for them. Whereas actually body liberation and, and fat liberation is all about widening that lens to other people. We are not just trying to carve out the space for ourselves individually.We're trying to carve out spaces and take up space in a way that honors other people's space that they're taking up as well and uplifting the bodies that are the most marginalized and going, okay, these are the people who need this space and we want them to have this space. They deserve unconditionally to have this space as well.And that's when I think it's really unhelpful when we have people who are trying to create community and take up their own space when they're not thinking about their impact on the other people and marginalized bodies around them.Laura: Yeah. And that's, I think the thing about the mid-size trend is that there is no acknowledgement of either thin privilege or of body liberation or of how there are people that are way more oppressed than, you know, struggling to find clothes for your size 12th body. Right. Jeanette: Definitely. Laura: Okay. I think, do we have time for one more question? Should we do one more and then, Jeanette: Let's do this. Okay, so this is a question from Janice. I've been on a disordered eating recovery journey for about three years. My rejection of diet culture and calling out of weight stigma, particularly in the medical profession, has been a dramatic change. My husband is not on this journey with me and is still fully committed to diet and exercise equals health and wellbeing.We've had arguments about it because when I call out weight stigma, he gets defensive. He now says he won't speak to me about body image, food, eating because he feels attacked. He also feels that my views are just subjective opinions and there is no evidence that what I say is true. I get upset and then I can't think objectively either.What is the easiest and quick data I can, or research that backs up our non diet, weight inclusive approach to health? Or should I just accept that this is something we really can't talk about at the moment and I continue my work and get in therapy for support. I really appreciate your advice and obviously love the podcast, and.Laura: Oh, oh, Janice, Janice, Janice, Janice. I felt really sad re when this question came in, we can, and we will give you papers that you can read, that's fine. But that's so far from the point here. It's so far from the point, because even if this is just your subjective experience, that really fucking matters, that's so important and you deserve to have your experiences validated.And so I just wanna do that first and foremost, like your experience of weight stigma, and particularly like you say in the medical profession, that's so valid and it matters and it's important. And I'm really sorry that that has been dismissed or trivialized. It's obviously not just in your head. So yeah, that's the first thing that I wanted to offer is that that really matters and that's really important. And I'm really sorry that you know, someone who you love and care about has dismissed you like that. That must be extremely painful. What are you thinking, Jeanette? Like can see youJeanette: Yeah.Laura: Just looking really sad as well.Jeanette: I just really feel for Janice, and I also think this is something that comes up a fair bit as well, especially if, um, the person themselves is in a large body and a fat body. And especially if the partner is at a fat or large body themselves, because obviously they've got a lot of work to be doing themselves around, you know, rejecting diet culture and working on challenging than internalized fatphobia.But I also, it's difficult doing that journey without a supportive partner. And it's even more difficult doing it with someone who wants to challenge, even if it's something that's subjective, that's hard. But also even if we gave, you know, give researching and show papers, I find it doesn't necessarily always, sometimes it does change people's mind because people need to be in the right place themselves to be able to hear the message.Unfortunately, this is why me and Laura aren't millionaires, because we can't go out and force people into rejecting diet culture. You've almost gotta get to this kind of place where you are ready to step into that space and ready to start doing this work of challenging everything that you've believed and everything you've internalized for pretty much the whole of our lives. And it's difficult. So difficult. Also thinking that the partner, your partner isn't in the same place that you are in relation to that as well. So, I'm sorry that you're experiencing this really.Laura: Yeah. And I don't know that I really have a, a helpful answer or solution. You know, I just wonder if you have like a safe place like that you can talk about these things and it doesn't sound like you necessarily do, but I wonder what like take to get you to be able to have conversations in a way that, you know, neither one of you feels attacked and you both have your experiences held and, and validated.And I don't know if that's like couples counselling or therapy or, you know, even working with like a Jeanette or a Laura or like, you know, somebody to help you process that together. And I'll link to some papers in the show notes, but like you say, Jeanette, I don't know if that's gonna nudge the dial any really, but the, the one that I'm thinking of is the Tracy Tylka paper, the weight inclusive versus weight normative approach to health because it really neatly, sort of lays out the issues and summarizes the evidence. I did a Q&A with a weight inclusive researcher, Lizzy Pope, a couple weeks ago, and she shared some research literature as well that that, um, and I think she includes that, that til paper that she uses when she's trying to convince other researchers that this is the way to approach things. Any other like resources or, or things that you think would be helpful?Jeanette: I think maybe you know, in the long term, something like that you can do as a couple to be able to validate each other. Trying to find that way forward is important. But in the short term, is there any way of you finding, um, your community, you know, have you got someone outside of your partner that you can discuss this with?Can you find someone, can you find someone through like Facebook groups? You know, is there anyone? Cause there's loads of really goods, um, anti-D diet, non-diet approach, Facebook groups that you can find. And although online friendship doesn't replace and obviously shouldn't replace the relationship that you have with your partner. But it could be a really good short-term solution. So you still have someone that you can talk to this, talk about all of your experiences about who can validate you, who can go, well actually yeah, this is what I'm experiencing as well, which might be useful.Laura: Yeah. I'm curious to hear like if you have, you know, if your husband has always been on board with this for you. If that's been like a learning curve. I feel like I'm pretty lucky in that Dave listens to all my podcasts and reads all my shit. Like he's the first person to see anything, to like read any drafts of anything I've written.So he just knows, that if he didn't get on board it would be divorce. Right. But I'm, I'm curious, like, did you have that, you know, because you've been on your own journey and we talked about that in the last podcast we did together, but how was, what was that experience like for you?Jeanette: I've had a very similar experience as you to be honest, I am incredibly lucky that, um, no matter what I have decided to do with my body, my husband has always been supportive, has always championed my own body autonomy. And I'm really, I'm really lucky, like exactly the same as you. He's always the first person to listen to podcasts and the first person to read my posts and, you know, he reads all my emails that he sends out.I dunno why he subscribes to them, but he also reads those, you know. So I'm really lucky. I think the place that I struggle with personally is my family. I have a member of my family who understandably, really understandably for her own personal reasons, is entrenched in diet culture. And I do set boundaries with, with her. And she knows that. And we've, we've had the, we've had the, the talk that, um, she's not allowed to talk about weight loss and diets and food being good and bad around the children especially. But she doesn't necessarily understand what I do. She's still very much, you know, fat equals bad. My family are all people who are in fat bodies.Like when you look at both sides of the, when I wear, I was, I was never just in, in my genetics to have a small body. I am six foot tall and I'm also fat. I am supposed to be taking up a lot of space. And when I look at the you know, the generations before me, they're the same. They're also tall people who are fat as well, which comes with a lot of generational, you know, diet culture. But yeah, it, it's hard. It's hard when you don't have family and you don't have, you know, in this case, a partner who is supportive of, of your own body autonomyLaura: Clearly the answer is you have to become an anti diet nutritionist. Like that's the, and then your husband will get it. All right, easy just do that.Jeanette: We just literally talk at them for so long that they have to listen to us and internalizeLaura: Yeah. They have to, they have to get it, otherwise you threaten them with the divorce. So thank you for sharing that, Jeanette. Really appreciate it. I think it's always like, just so much more helpful to hear people's personal experience. So yeah, I'm so glad that you were here to answer these questions with me.I don't feel like we give Janice a very satisfying answer. I'm sorry, Janice. Hopefully there is something to, to think about in that. But, um, yeah, I think we, we've covered a lot of ground here. There were a couple questions that we didn't get to, so maybe we'll do a part two at some point and finish them up.Should we share our snacks? So at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they're snacking on. So it can be like a podcast or a book, or a movie or a show, or like literal snacks. So what do you have for us?Jeanette: The first thing that came to mind of what I have been snacking on recently is a podcast. And, um, I have been a very busy bee at the moment, so having a podcast, um, that has been away from like anti-diet Laura: Yes. Jeanette: Sort thinking about fatness and stuff has been a really lovely respite to me. And it's, um, my, and it's probably one, it's been out for a while. I think they're finishing up. my dad wrote a porno.Laura: Oh yeah. I haven't listened to that in so long.Jeanette: No, I keep on it. I started listening to it back in 2019 and then I kind of forgot about that. Now, every now and then I kind of pick up, I go, oh my goodness, I need this in my life. And it's usually when I'm really busy. Like usually when I'm really busy, my brain just needsLaura: Something. Yeah.Jeanette: and something really funny.And so that's what I've been snacking on at the moment. How about you?Laura: So funny. We've been watching a lot of Bob's Burgers, which I love, Bob's burgers. Because our kid goes to bed so freaking late these days, so we usually have like, you know, we just wanna watch something mindless for like 20 minutes before we go to bed, have a snack, and then like an, I mean an actual food snack, watch a show. So they, yeah, that's like, that's what we've been watching lately. Um, but also, like the other thing that I had, cuz just cuz it's sitting on my desk, this is super bougie, um, because I was like having a bad day and I went into asip, which is always a mistake. And I bought, what is it? It's, um, like body bam, pink grapefruit, orange rind and lemon rind. And it's in this like paint tube, which I love Jeanette: I love that.Laura: Yeah, it's so, it's not, I wish, like I'm, I'm holding it up to you, like, you can smell it, you can't, but it's like really citrusy and fresh and like Yeah. I just, it's very, it's like a complete indulgence. But I love it. So yeah, that's my snack also.Um, Jeanette, tell us where people can find more about you and your work and a little bit of what you're up to.Jeanette: Okay. Um, you can find me on Instagram, the mindset nutritionist. You can find my freebie, which is great on my website, www dot mindset nutritionist dot co uk.Laura: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, go download Jeanette's freebie. It's all about getting in the picture and yeah, being there for the, the moment and not being like hyperfocused on how you look or your body. Jeanette: Thank you so much for saying that for me,Laura: All right. Thanks for listening everyone, and thank you, Jeanette for being here and helping us answer all those questions.Jeanette: so much for having me.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week’s episode of Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast. This week is a solo episode. I released one of these back in season 1 of the pod, where I read one of my essays to you. And it seems to be something you all really enjoyed so I’m bringing it back this week by reading probably the most popular essay I’ve published here on my Substack - “The Kids Standing in Clean Eating's Long Shadow”.I published this essay back in January this year, after seeing one of Ella Mills’ (AKA Deliciously Ella) posts over Halloween. In the post in question, Mills went on the attack about Halloween sweets and candies, labelling them as ‘poisonous’, ‘non-foods’ that are ‘addictive’ and ‘full of shit’. And I really wanted to unpack the judgement and all too familiar moralisation of clean eating that diet culture creates. No transcript today because the full piece is published here.And don’t forget, for the month of March you can get 20% off paid subscription to celebrate CIHAS turning 6 months old! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

Today I'm talking with Dr. Scott Griffiths. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the Physical Appearance Research Team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers and health professionals who investigate body image, appearance related stigmas and discrimination, appearance enhancing substances, appearance enhancement and appearance related psychological disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.I wanted to talk to Scott about the phenomenon of muscle dysmorphia, a disorder that sits somewhere between a body dysmorphic disorder and an eating disorder that tends to impact cis boys and men. It's sometimes characterised as the male anorexia. Of course cis boys and men get anorexia too, but muscle dysmorphia is a bit different. It's sometimes known as Bigorexia. It's when an individual doesn't believe that they're big enough or sufficiently muscular to the point that they devote their lives to gains and progress in the gym. They might follow extremely strict diets which prioritise protein and cut out a lot of carbohydrates, and in some cases men can turn to using anabolic steroids, which have some really serious long-term effects for both physical and mental health as you'll hear us talking about. A lot of Scott's research is about the ways that social media, and particularly TikTok feeds people who are vulnerable to eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia, more and more content that upholds unrealistic body and image based ideals, and actually fuels eating disorders.It's really interesting research to hear about, but as a parent and as someone who works with eating disorders, it's really terrifying.Find out more about Scott’s work here.Follow his work on Twitter here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here’s the transcript in full:Scott: When you're on your feed and TikTok is delivering videos for you to consume, all of the reference points you are getting from content that it’s popular and influential and that people are responding to it. It's so divorced from reality that you've got a greater pool of people comparing and feeling poorly about themselves and now investing in the general necessity of looking better.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to Can I Have Another Snack? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet, registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. We're having conversations about how we nourish ourselves and our kids in all senses of the word in the hellscape that is diet culture.Today I'm talking with Dr. Scott Griffiths. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the Physical Appearance Research Team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers and health professionals who investigate body image, appearance related stigmas and discrimination, appearance enhancing substances, appearance enhancement and appearance related psychological disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.I wanted to talk to Scott about the phenomenon of muscle dysmorphia, a disorder that sits somewhere between a body dysmorphic disorder and an eating disorder that tends to impact cis boys and men. It's sometimes characterized as the male anorexia, which of course cis boys and men get anorexia too. But muscle dysmorphia is a bit different. It's sometimes known as bigorexia. It's when an individual doesn't believe that they're big enough or sufficiently muscular to the point that they devote their lives to gains and progress in the gym. They might follow extremely strict diets which prioritize protein and cut out a lot of carbohydrates. And in some cases men can turn to using anabolic steroids, which have some really serious long-term effects for both physical and mental health as you'll hear us talking about. A lot of Scott's research is about the ways that social media, and particularly TikTok feeds people who are vulnerable to eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia, more and more content that upholds unrealistic body and image based ideals and actually fuels eating disorders.It's really interesting research to hear about, but as a parent and as someone who works with eating disorders, it's. Really terrifying. So you'll notice that this episode has a slightly different vibe to some of the other episodes this season. I'm asking Scott more about his research on muscle dysmorphia rather than his, you know, personal story. And I'm curious to hear what you think of this episode and get some feedback from you as to whether you'd like more interviews with academics, researchers and practitioners with a particular kind of expertise or on a particular topic like this, in addition to hearing people's lived experience. So if you want, you can drop me a comment over on Substack underneath this episode, um, which you can find at laurathomas.substack.com.And while I have you here, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely listener and reader supported, but in order to be able to cover the costs of admin and people and pay guests and contributors. A lot of my time is devoted to other work outside of the newsletter. That means I have less time to bring deeply researched essays as well as thoughtful interviews here on the podcast. I'd love to be able to devote most of my time to the work and the community that we're building here, but that means I need a lot more of you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. I also know that that's a big ask right now. So for the month of March, I'm running a one off spring sale on Can I Have another Snack subscriptions. They are 20% off, so for this month only, if you subscribe, you'll pay four pounds a month or 40 pounds for the year instead of five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, which is a bargain. I'm not going to be running this good a deal for the rest of the year, so now is the time to cash in. If you've been sitting on the fence it's time to make a move. I'll put a subscription link in the show notes. You can also gift a subscription to a friend or family member or a coworker and get that same deal. And remember that if you want to sign up with some pals or like your NCT group from five years ago, you always get 20% off of group subscriptions. So I will also link to group subscriptions in the show notes.Okay, team, I appreciate your support and hopefully one day we can make this work more sustainable, so I can give up my side hustles. Thank you so much for being here. Here is my interview with Scott Griffiths.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Scott, I would love it if you could start by telling us a little bit about how you got interested in studying appearance related psychological disorders like body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders.Scott: When I was a teenager, I worked at a cinema and someone who worked there who was kind of a friend of mine, a young woman, she had anorexia, and I remember at the time being completely mystified by her ailment and predicament. And it's probably quite stigmatizing in retrospect because it seemed to me as a, you know, kind of a fool, that the solution to her problem was readily at hand.Like she was really thin and, and just needed to eat. And that kind of set my thinking in motion about the really complex feelings and beliefs that folks can have about their body and their eating, et cetera. And it was when I was in undergraduate doing a, a Bachelor of Psychology that I had a couple of friends, both young men who would say things to me that would remind me of that young woman who had anorexia in the cinema and things they would say were similar, but the manifestations of them were different. The kinds of eating and, and training and the bodies that they wanted for themselves were all different, but it's core, it seemed like the same kind of issue and disorder. So I think that was what got me interested. And it's developed a lot since then.Laura: Yeah, it's so interesting. I think you know that I work with people with eating disorders and something I often hear from them is like, well, it just, how misunderstood that the disorder is, and from the outside, especially to anyone who knows nothing about eating disorders, it seems like, yeah, it's really simple just to eat more food.But I think you've been on your own learning journey with that and, and come through the other side and realized it's, it's a lot more complicated than that. These people would, you know, if, if it was just, just as easy as eating food, they would do it. But unfortunately that's, that's not the case.Sorry, that was a little tangent cuz I think you were touching on something that I know is really important to those with lived experience of eating disorders. And then kind of moving further along, it's really interesting that you saw the parallels between anorexia nervosa and then what I think you would probably characterize as body dysmorphic disorder. Which is the same but different. And maybe the same is too much of a stretch. But it's similar, but also different. So I'm wondering for people who are unfamiliar with body dysmorphic disorder, can you tell us what exactly it is and maybe some of the, the des describing more of the parallels between something like anorexia nervosa or what we would consider to be a more traditional in inverted commas eating disorder versus what we see in the BDD presentation.Scott: When I was talking with those, those friends, those young men when I was at university the disorder that would best capture what was going on for them is something we call muscle dysmorphia, which is a subtype of body dysmorphia disorder, which kind of sits alongside eating disorders. They are distinct, but they're often comorbid.They both have body image often as a central element. So body dysmorphic disorder, the cardinal symptom is you believing there is a defect in your appearance. It can be completely imaginary or it can be real, but the severity of it in your head is almost always much more severe than it is in actual objective reality.And in the context of muscle dysmorphia, which many people, including myself, see more as an eating disorder than body dysmorphic disorder. The defect in appearance is guys, some girls, but often guys who objectively are, are very large and muscular, but when they look in the mirror, what they see reflected back to them is someone who is scrawny, out of shape or overweight.Just a big difference to how they actually are not at all dissimilar to anorexia where we have people, often young women predominantly, but also some men who look in the mirror and see someone reflected back to them who is very different to how they actually look.Laura: It's interesting that you said that you characterize muscle dysmorphic disorder as more similar to an eating disorder than to true body dysmorphic disorder, and I'm curious to hear a little bit more about why you feel like it fits more into that category.Scott: Yeah. To be fair, when people debate about whether muscle dysmorphia ought to be a body dysmorphic disorder as it currently is classified or an eating disorder, it feels a little bit like a semantic exercise.Laura: Absolutely.Scott: The real push and importance in research as far as I'm concerned, is trying to understand both disorders and develop better treatments and trying to figure out which, which category where there's so much overlap between these two categories already, it belongs to, feels a little like a moot point, but to, to answer the question. For me, it's because when you look at the central pathology that motivates folks with muscle dysmorphia, the low self-esteem, especially around appearance, the kinds of things they believe with respect to why they have to look a certain way in order to have worth and be loved.The attention given to dieting and to exercise and the inability to tolerate deviations from that, the need to constantly progress, the perfectionism, it's all there. It all feels like different sides of the same coin. And when I speak to people, including yourself and your audience, it feels to me like explaining away muscle dysmorphia as one manifestation of an eating disorder, kind of like anorexia, or the reverse of it is just an easy way to see how it is that eating disorders are so much more than just thinness, that they can manifest in all sorts of different ways depending on the types of bodies that people feel compelled to achieve for themselves.Laura: Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. And I'm, I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about sort of, you know, maybe not with going with, without going into tons and tons of detail that might be upsetting to hear, but just tell us a little bit about, a bit more about you know, how would you know if someone had muscle dysmorphic disorder? You know, I'm thinking about parents who, you know, what are the signs and symptoms that someone might want to look out for that are sort of red flags, if you will.Scott: Got you. So, when you're trying to identify red flags, some muscle dysmorphia, a useful starting point is to recognize that almost everything that is common in muscle dysmorphia can exist and be benign. So you can train five, six days a week every day of the week if you want. And it's completely fine, as long as it's working for you.You can diet right, and it can be fine. Not a psychological disorder if it's working for you. It's not encouraging people to go and do it, but it's not a psychological disorder to do it in muscle dysmorphia. It's when there is a preoccupation and that preoccupation is causing impairment. So it could be that your training and dieting have become so strict that when you feel that your training or dieting are about to be compromised in some way, maybe there's an important social occasion that you have to attend, and it means that you don't get to stick to your diet or go to train or something unexpected comes up, and you have to prioritize that other important unexpected thing.If that brings you anxiety and guilt makes you angry at yourself, then you are in the territory of massive dysmorphia as opposed to just behaviors that are otherwise benign with respect to disorder.Laura: Yeah, so you're just highlighting here that you know, the behaviors in and of themselves are not pathological. You know, plenty of people go to the gym, you know, they are super careful with their diet. Where it runs into kind of hot water is when, you know, that becomes almost like all encompassing.It takes over your life. It doesn't allow for any flexibility. It becomes very rigid. You can't go to your mates birthday party or just like, go pick up a pizza after work because it’s a mess. So that flexibility in eating, that flexibility in your social life, but also I suppose kind of the feelings of guilt, remorse, stress, that might come up if you do do those things.Scott: That's right. And the deteriorations tend to come from many places. They don't just come from one. So maybe you find that on the days where you have to rest where you can't be in gym training, cuz you've gotta have a couple of rest days to recover, you don't feel so good on those days. Maybe every time you don't progress in the gym, so you're not adding on to the weight, you're not getting stronger, it makes you feel like rubbish.Whereas when you first started out, maybe all of those things made you feel really good. Maybe your relationships are starting to suffer. Maybe your partner has had four or five conversations with you now about how they don't like how it's so challenging to go out to a restaurant, et cetera, etc.There's going to be no one thing, but the things tend to all come. Together. And what's challenging as you would well know in the eating disorder space is that the person who is in the thick of it is sometimes not the best judge of how extreme and rigid what they are doing is, and not uncommon at all to have folks who've come out the other end of these disorders look back and say, oh man, I can't believe I didn't see just how crazy it was for me at that.Laura: And that's a really important point, and I'd like to come back and think a little bit about how particularly a parent might address this or raise their concerns with you know, maybe their teen who they know is becoming super fixated on the gym and really rigid around that.Maybe we could come back to that because I feel I still wanna characterize a little bit more of what might be going on for people with muscle dysmorphic disorder. And a big piece that I feel like we haven't talked about yet is the use of anabolic steroids.So yeah, could you tell us how that and maybe any other kind of diet aids and things fit into the picture of muscle dysmorphic disorder?Scott: Yeah, sure. So, if you wanted to be thin and skinny and you were going to abuse drugs to get there, you might use laxatives and diuretics. If you wanna be big and muscular the drug that will typically be abused is anabolic steroids. So the most basic anabolic steroid is just a synthetic form of testosterone, the sex differentiating hormone that men tend to have more of than women, and it helps to synthesize muscle. So if you wanna be bigger muscular, if you've been influenced by, you know, famous fitness influencers, many of whom are using steroids, it may be something you're tempted to turn to and unlike with laxatives and diuretics, where if you take them, they don't have any substantive impact on the calories that you absorb (another way of saying they don't work very well). anabolic steroids, unfortunately do work very well. It's a bit of a public relations disaster, really.Laura: Can I just put a tiny caveat that for people who abuse laxatives and diuretics, in terms of, I just wanna highlight that they are still really dangerous and they can cause electrolyte imbalances. Just because I know people with eating disorders will listen to this podcast and I've worked with eating disorders for long enough to know that they will hear that and think, oh, okay, that means they're safeSo, I just want to highlight that it can cause problems in terms of your intestines. There can be problems with, I'm forgetting the terminology now, but basically twisting your intestines because it just messes with your digestion so much.I'm thinking about laxatives here, but also it can cause dangerously low electrolyte levels in the body, which can cause fits and seizures. So they're not benign, and I don't want anyone to walk away with the message that they're benign. But that's aside from what you're talking about, which is that yeah, you know that people with muscle dysmorphic disorder are more likely to abuse steroids.So, yeah. Could I pass it back to you now?Scott: Of course, and steroids on top of being effective, which makes them very attractive in terms of, you know, as a temptation they also have rather significant health consequences, especially in the long term. But why I bring up the fact that they are effective for building muscle into such a significant degree that you have outfits like the International Olympics Committee who test for doping.The use of things like steroids in sports is because once you're on them, you will experience the progress that you've been craving and to a very significant degree. So folks will get on them, they will put on a lot of muscle, they might even lose some body fat at the same time, which is incredibly challenging to do if you are not on these substances.And of course, they feel. for a time, but they still have the core beliefs and attitudes and thinking so that high doesn't last for very long. But now not only are they not satisfied with their current size often, but to drop in size by coming off would trigger the kinds of intense feelings and distorted thinking that you also see when folks with anorexia are going through recovery and are, you know, weight restoring.So it's incredibly challenging. And what ends up happening is that you have to then treat both the muscle dysmorphia, which is very much a psychological disorder, and the anabolic steroids and their effects, which is an endocrine impactor. And dealing with these in combos is challenging.Laura: And, I was just wondering if you could talk a little to the, the longer term side effects of of the steroid use.Scott: Sure. So the longer term side effects tend to focus on increased mortality and morbidity from, from cardiovascular events, heart attacks, enlarged hearts. The endocrine effects focus predominantly on the capacity of your endocrine system to resume a normal amount of testosterone production endogenously, so from within, subsequent to stopping steroid use.Because when you flood your system with anabolic steroids or synthetic testosterone, the reason men's testicles shrink is because most of the function of testicles is to make testosterone. So the body says, oh, I'm full of testosterone. Now I'm not gonna make any more myself. But when you doing the injections of the tablets and you don't have that testosterone coming in, the body has to restart that system from scratch. And as we've learned, it is not very reliable at doing that. And it is very unpredictable how well that is gonna happen. And there's many, many, many instances of men as young as 23, 24, who will be on testosterone replacement therapy for their entire life, and who have their fertility are greatly compromised now because their bodies have not resumed normal testosterone production.Laura: Yeah. What you're describing is really similar to what happens when once this women are taking the contraceptive pill and then they come off of it and they might not restart their period for five or six months after, hopefully all going well. But what you're talking about, I think in muscle dysmorphic disorder, where there's an abuse of these drugs that those, as I understand it, the doses are much higher than a typical physiological dose.And so the impact, the effect is much, much greater and could last a lot longer, you know, if function is ever fully regained.Scott: Yeah. To give you some context, a beginner's of anabolic steroids, a beginner steroid cycle, if you will, might prescribe something like 500 milligrams of testosterone enate, a really commonly available steroid. I'd wager a bet that it's most widely available in the UK, certainly is in Australia. That beginner's dose is already five times higher than the maximum that a healthy male would produce on their own. And that much testosterone, flooding a system is beyond the bounds of what the human body is used to dealing with. Laura: Yeah. And, and you mentioned you know, the UK context there and there were headlines a couple of years ago that suggested that first of all, that predominantly steroid users in the UK were were using steroids as an appearance or an aesthetic related, you know, for aesthetic reasons rather than for purely like bodybuilding lifting reasons.Although I, I can imagine those things get kind of murky to tease apart and. At that time, I think this was about 2018 the, the reports were that there were about a million steroid users in the UK for, you know, for aesthetic reasons. Is that an accurate reflection? Do you know? Like, is that likely an underestimation, an overestimation, or do we have any, any real sense of what's going on?Scott: I'd say there's a great chance that's an underestimate. Steroid use is incredibly stigmatized. It's heavily criminalized and users are extremely loath to admit even to health professionals that they use anabolic steroids. And you see these schisms even in fitness communities online. So Instagram, TikTok, where there's this constant accusations that someone is using steroids or is natural or bloody for short. So, it's all very underground and it means that whenever you do get an, an estimate based on data that is credible. So in Australia that would be visits to needle and syringe programs as one example, to get injecting equipment for steroids. You can be almost certain that that's just a fraction of what's actually going on out there. And all the evidence we have, at least in Australia suggests that anabolic steroid use is increasing in prevalence and it's gone from something that used to be the purview of just athletes through to professional weightlifters to now those only being a minority. It's very much an aesthetics driven thing.Laura: So tell us what we know about who Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder impacts. You've alluded to that it's mostly cis men. But can you elaborate any further on that?Scott: Sure. So itt's mostly cis men because cis men are the largest pool who would want to be muscular. But you see certain subpopulations of men who are more vulnerable. Gay men are more vulnerable to muscle dysmorphia and to using anabolic steroids because of the heightened appearance pressures in that space. Younger men. So it does tend to be something that has its onset in younger years similar to anorexia.Laura: Sorry, I was gonna ask you, we know kind of what age do boys start becoming vulnerable? Because we know in anorexia it can be as young as like eight or nine sometimes, and that age is getting younger and younger.Scott: Yeah. And you see the same thing in muscle dysmorphia. So the first vulnerability factors can appear there. Studies have been done with action figurines and you have young boys asked which one do they prefer more? And they're able to, to, they have their preferences in line with what you'd expect, and they'll expect a preference for their own bodies to look certain ways, as you'd expect, given media messaging.So the vulnerability factors are there. In terms of muscle dysmorphia on setting tends to take quite a while. You'd be familiar. It's not the case that you hear a couple of messages, you get a mean comment about your appearance, and then suddenly you have it . It's years of internalizing and a bunch of factors that come along, and then it might strike in your teens or your early adulthood.And we see that in muscle dysmorphia too. Steroids often come into the piece a little later, so early adulthood to mid, and it's because they're expensive and they're hard to access.Laura: Yeah. You need to be kind of savvy also. Yeah. I can imagine kids who have figured out the whole cryptocurrency thing. I'm sure that they, you know, would get in there if they could, if they had the means. So you're saying gay men are more at risk. What, are there any other sort of subpopulations that you know, you're particularly worried about?Scott: Men who are in sports for which body weight or some aesthetic element around body weight is a key part. So not uncommon to have guys with muscle dysmorphia say that a lot of some of these thoughts came about because they had to weigh in for their sports. Maybe they were, they were boxes or fighters, something like that. So it just primed them to be in the space of being anxious about the number on the scale and how their fitness was progressing. Things like that.Laura: Do we know anything about racialized groups and, and who might be most at risk?Scott: There is some evidence though, it's not great in terms of its quality as of yet, that folks in predominantly white countries who are not white themselves may be at greater risk for both muscle dysmorphia and steroid use. Data we produced in Australia that was specific to gay bisexual men of, of various races suggested for example, that, you know, if you were an Asian gay man in Australia, that you might be more likely to use anabolic steroids and to succumb to muscle dysmorphia.And in talking with Asian gay men in interviews in qualitative research, part of it is because, you know, if you are an Asian gay man in Australia, then you are often stereotyped as being more feminine. You're not able to be part of the masc for masc subculture, which is still quite dominant and exclusionary and anabolic steroids are a way to compensate for those other aspects of your appearance that are diminishing your masculine capital. You can see something similar happen for men who are shorter. If you go to spaces online where men are complaining about being short to other men, they'll often see, just hit the gym, just get jacked. It's a way to compensate for those other elements that are not helping you to embody that masculine archetypal, conventionally attractive male.Laura: Hmm. Okay. A while back, you talked about pressures from the media. And that has, you know historically, particularly in anorexia research, been held up as a huge antecedent, I suppose, to eating disorder precipitation, but now there's this whole other layer of social media on top of things. How does, and I'm thinking about the fact that young people in particular hang out on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and maybe less Facebook these days I don't know. I don't go on Facebook. So what do we know about the influence that social media is having on aesthetic and appearance based pressures?Scott: Social media makes people more vulnerable to eating disorders, including muscle dysmorphia. And if you are vulnerable, it can make the transition to having one of these disorders shorter. It can intensify it. And I think it can also assist in maintaining them for longer as well. So the reason why media messaging can be so problematic and damaging in terms of vulnerability for and experiencing eating disorders is because you end up with all these idealized reference points and what social media does is expands that limitlessly so that when you're on your feed and TikTok is delivering videos for you to consume, all of the reference points you are getting from content that is popular and influential and that people are responding to. It's so divorced from reality that you've got a greater pool of people comparing and feeling poorly about themselves and now investing in the general necessity of looking better.Laura: So this is an area that you've been researching. Am I right?Scott: Yeah, that's right.Laura: Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, specific studies or experiments that you've done, that you're excited to share a bit more about?Scott: So, you know, studies of social media, including of TikTok, generally what they will do is have an experiment and you'll show people some images or videos from social media platforms that you're worried about and see how people respond. Or you have people answer a survey question that will amount to, how often do you use, say, TikTok, Instagram, and you correlate that with some measure like how you feel about your body.And that's all well and fine. But where the real explanatory power is, in my mind, is in big data and getting access into exactly what people are seeing and viewing so you can map their social media experience. So what we've been able to do is to take a group of people with eating disorders and a group of people who, we call it our healthy controls, that don't have eating disorders. And see their entire TikTok algorithm from the day they installed it to the day we requested the data. And that means we can track exactly every video that's being delivered to them, the comments, the likes, all with their consent, I'll just say, of course not being done without that. And we can see what is happening.What it means is we can show things like if you are someone with an eating disorder, your TikTok algorithm that decides what videos you see every time you log in is 50% more likely to deliver you an appearance oriented video for each and every video that you see compared to someone without an eating disorder.And the amount of videos that these folks are seeing, the average is around 2000 a month. So if you are someone in weekly therapy for an eating disorder, If you're a clinician and you have someone who you'reLaura: Oh my God. I'm just sitting here thinking about like some of my clients. I'm like,Scott: That's 500 videos on average that they are seeing between each session. And when we run studies to compliment these on new phones with fresh TikTok accounts that we manage, it only takes three minutes to get an appearance oriented video.You get 17 in the first 20 minutes. So it's not that people are seeking this content out. It happens anyway. And when we look at the rate of liking that folks with eating disorders have for this content versus folks without. It's not that the folks with eating disorders are looking for this content, they're liking it at the same rate because what's algorithm is doing is not taking what you like to determine what you want to see. They're interested in engagement, whether it's Facebook or, or Instagram or TikTok. It's what keeps you looking and what keeps you looking isn't just what makes you happy. It's what makes you anxious or what makes you upset. It's what makes you mad. And if you are someone who is really unhappy or worried about the way you look, it knows which videos will make you look more. And that's exactly what happens. And you can see over time how the algorithm becomes more echo chambery as people get sucked into the vortex of this content.Laura: I think the scariest part for me both as someone who works with eating disorders and as a parent, like my child is obviously not on social media right now, but will be one day I'm sure, is the fact that they know, like the social media companies know exactly what they're doing because wasn't it a couple of years ago, but there was a whistleblower at meta. Who said who, who said, we have all of this information that shows that our algorithms are making body image and eating disorders worse, and yet they're not doing anything about it.Scott: Yeah. And then they downplayed and discredited their own data generated by the star researchers they themselves hired which is absurd. And the reason that they don't wanna do anything about it is because the..Laura: It's capitalism.Sorry, go. Scott: No, you, you're exactly right. The money is made from engagement. And I think the faint that the social media companies do is to imply that what they're doing is giving people what they want, community connectedness. And when it comes to advertising that they're connecting people with the products that they want to buy. And through being able to like things, you can get the sense that, oh, the social media companies are just sitting back and people are doing what they want in there.They're getting what they want, but certainly, the controls that you think you have over what your algorithm, especially on TikTok is sending you is less. And it's about engagement. And engagement doesn't care how you feel, if it's positive or negative, it just cares that you spent the time. Whatever it takes to get you to do more time is what it is going to send you. It's worth noting also that when you look at the proportion of appearance honored content that your algorithm sends you, so how big this echo chamber is, that correlates strongly with the eating disorder symptoms. So the more your algorithm becomes, you know, polluted by appearance, honored content, the worse the eating disorder becomes in tandem. And why wouldn't it?Laura: I have a question, and you might not be able to answer this. One of my clients uses the term recovery porn in eating disorder recovery, which are all of these images of usually women who claim to be in recovery or recovered. Have you looked at the impact that these recovery accounts have on eating disorder recovery?Scott: I've not looked at that specifically, but I'm well aware of the phenomenon your client has described. And unfortunately, lots of social media phenomena and hashtags, like for example eating disorder recovery, body positivity is another good example.Laura: Yeah.Scott: They are not clear paragons, they're not at all as clearly useful as we would like them to be if someone went searching for them. You go looking for ed recovery, you might find an account that is extremely thoughtful in the way that that content is presented right alongside content that is clearly not being very helpful. Just like with body positivity, you might get someone who hearkens back to the, the fat acceptance movement, who's really preaching the fighting the good flight right next to someone who is perhaps well-meaning, but still thin, skinny, and they're pinching a tiny little roll of fat and going body positivity, which as I can tell from your reaction is missing the point.Laura: Yeah. Okay. Maybe, maybe something for a future research agenda then, Scott.Scott: Absolutely. It's a great suggestion.Laura: I'm curious to, because, and I think what it comes, what it comes back to you articulated it there really well. I think something that I tried to unpack with my clients, you know, is thinking about, okay, well, is this image, they might have the message on point, right? But if there's an image that is still highly focused on aesthetics, it's highly focused on their body and, you know, showing off their body in a particular way, then that really completely undermines the message that they might have been sending with the best of intention.So just a little interesting aside, but you know, you've talked about how social media, you know, there might be some benefits to social media. I think there's definitely some work that has shown that coming out of the center of appearance research, but it's murkier and less clearly defined than, than maybe we would like to think.So you painted this really dark picture of social media and, and how it contributes to muscle dysmorphic disorder. So I'm wondering what we can do both from maybe a clinical perspective, or maybe a public health perspective as well as maybe a parenting perspective to protect our kids from internalizing these messages because they're gonna be exposed to them. Right. We know that for sure. So how do we buffer the impact, both maybe at the broader public health level, because this is a public health issue clearly, but also maybe in our own parenting in our own homes. Scott: Yeah. And okay, you're absolutely right. You cannot start from a base of let's not use social media altogether. That's, that's the arena. That's where youth culture is driven in, telling young people not to use it is just not practical. So they're going to use it. Encouraging your child to be a critical consumer of media generally, including on social media, is really useful.I think if you feel confident enough to talk about it, explaining to them that what they see is delivered to them by algorithms can be useful. That's something we're exploring in our own research where we want young people to have a better understanding that what they're seeing in their feed is not a one-to-one reflection of reality to the world as it actually is.And that's beyond the, you know, manipulation of photos and self portrayals that go on, but like the algorithm just feeding you with whatever activates your emotions. Part of that is this tool we're developing that can visualize your algorithm for you so that you can know and compare it to others just how biased it's become. And this can be for clinicians too, because if you have a client walk in the door, you need to know if 70% of their feed is appearance oriented, which is not a number I picked out of thin air. That's an actual number from clients we had with anorexia nervosa. And then you can have a productive conversation with that person around, okay, your algorithm is not only not reflective of reality, it's doing you harm and this is how we can work to remediate it.Laura: I would definitely, like sign me up for that tool. I will test it for you. Whatever you need me to do.Scott: Lovely.Laura: So, so yeah, having conversations that, you know, that there's obviously, the images themselves have been highly altered, stylized, potentially photoshopped, all kinds of different things. But then there's this whole machinery and infrastructure behind that feeding you more and more and more of these idealized images.Scott: Yeah, that's it. And you know, when social media, the way we use it, a lot of the time, like a lot of the time when people are using TikTok, people's guards are down. It's incidental. It's minutes in bed when you first wake up, it's bed when you might be trying to go to sleep. It's when you're on a bus, it's when you're bored, it's when you're tired.It's not active consumption of content. And before you know it, you can have scrolled through or mindlessly watched tens and tens of videos that have appearance oriented content and, just like with how people think that advertising isn't working on them, but the reason that so much money is pumped into it is because it does have cumulative accumulative impacts on, on purchasing decisions. The same thing happens with social media, so it's about getting people to recognize that and to try to minimize what's happening in those spaces because it all adds up.Laura: You know, you said kind of towards the top of the interview that people who are deep in their eating disorder, whether it's anorexia, whether it's muscle dysmorphic disorder, bulimia, orthorexia, whatever form that takes, they are, you know, the least clear in what's going on, right? They're the least easily able to see what's going on. They are definitely aware that there's a problem, but they might not be able to identify exactly what that is. So, with that in mind, I'm wondering for, for parents particularly of teen boys, tweens and teens, it sounds like are both vulnerable and kind of heading into adolescence.If a parent notices more protein powders coming into the house, more you know, concerns about lean protein and less carbohydrates on the plate and more time working out or conversations about being fit, about being healthy, and they're, they're noticing that, that's becoming increasingly rigid and perfectionistic. How might a parent approach this, do you think? Scott: It's a very common question that has never had an answer come easy to me, as I'm sure it wouldn't for many parents because teenage boys are notoriously challenging to talk to and get to open up to, especially about these,Laura: Yeah, but you're a psychologist so you ,Scott: So I'm obliged to have an answer and I I have you. So I think the way we approach folks who we think have muscle dysmorphia, but who are perhaps reluctant to talk about it, is to emphasize those parts of their training and their dieting that aren't working for them. We don't say, “Is it making you sad or anxious?” and, “what's not working for you?” because often whether it's a young boy, a teen, a young adult, they're just thinking about progress. They wanna progress. It's, I want my lifts to get stronger, my body to get better, etc. And the things that we think of as the symptoms of the disorder, the things that we're worried about, they're not worried about them per se. They're worried about their progress. And it's those things on the side that are making it hard, right? So we frame it as, okay. What's, what's getting in the way of you being able to train and diet and be like this and, and that maybe it's, ah, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't train today. I had to go and do this.It's like, oh, okay. So like, how did it make you feel? It's like, you can try to get them to see that it's the rigidity that is being more unhelpful than helpful. We deliberately keep it above the level of feelings for a while until that is more approachable. Often with our young clients, we'll just pitch it as, look we don't want to change your training and your dieting. We're not gonna tell you not to go to the gym. We just want you to be in a space where you can get back to making the progress that you wanna make. Then you've got your foot in the door and you go from thereLaura: You're getting them on side. You're telling them I'm on your team. Yeah.Scott: Yeah. Because whilst you can say the term body image to most young women and they intuitively know what you're thinking about, if I try to say, “are you worried about your body image?” to a young man, even if I know they are, it's so super clear as day, a lot of the time they'll say no.Laura: Yeah,Scott: Like straight up, they'll say no to you. Because it's just not the language that they speakLaura: Yeah, yeah. But if you can talk to them in terms of gains and what's getting in the way of theirScott: What's getting in the way? You know, you're not talking about feelings per se. That's just the best way I can describe it. It's a very tactful and challenging spot to be in, I think.Laura: Yeah. I mean, my hope is that I never have to broach this conversation with my kid, but fuck parenting is hard, man.Scott: Yeah, I certainly empathize.Laura: And I really hope you don't say CBT right now, but what do we know about treatment? What is available to help young people, older people, whoever is impacted by muscle dysmorphia to help them recover?Scott: The evidence-based for effective treatment for muscle dysmorphia is extremely limited. It's nowhere near what we have for the other eating disorders. There is nothing in the way of an RCT or anything like that. I have a PhD student now who is running the first manualised treatment for muscle dysmorphia, so we'll see how that turns out.Generally speaking, the approaches that work for eating disorders will also work for muscle dysmorphia, in my opinion, because again, the core maintaining factors of the disorder and precipitating factors are very, very similar. And what has been encouraging as a first port of call, the major eating disorder charities that run helplines, so certainly the Butterfly Foundation in Australia perhaps BEAT over in the UK, they are increasingly cognizant of muscle dysmorphia and the helpline staff are better equipped to, to talk about it, which is perfect.Laura: I noticed the other day that there's even an NHS page, which, you know, you and I spoke a couple of years ago for Don't Salt My Game, and I'm pretty sure it didn't exist even then. So there is certainly more recognition and awareness, but it sounds like people are more equipped to have these conversations, certainly in the eating disorder space.I worry more about kind of general practice in terms of medicine because there's even and, and don't get, this is not GP bashing . We all know how much pressure GPs are under, but there is a lack of awareness even about more traditional eating disorders in that space. So yeah, I reckon BEAT would be probably the best first port of call there.But in terms of treatment, it sounds like we don't exactly know yet. Your sense is that probably some of the modalities that we use for other eating disorders are probably gonna be successful because of, you know, the same underlying maintaining and precipitating factors. But I guess we need to wait for your student to do their research before we have more clear answers on that.Scott: Yeah. But even then for the really convincing answer that yes, you can confidently send someone for this treatment and there's a great chance they get better years and years away from that. But what I find promising is in talking to eating disorder clinicians, in training them when it comes to muscle dysmorphia, it's not a case of, oh, how am I gonna do this?It's, oh wow. There's all the parallels are all there, which is great because it means that the tools are there, it's just a matter of education both on the part of the clinician and on on people and young men so that they know they can go and seek help and that help will be there to meet them.Laura: Absolutely. And I just wanna go back to the TikTok algorithm thing, which is super disturbing to me, but, but just to kind of close out, I wonder, you know, from your perspective as a researcher, what do we need to be doing both in terms of a research agenda, but maybe also like a public health policy agenda in terms of tackling some of these, like really problematic systems, I suppose, that young people are up against. I don't know if that question makes sense, but like, where do we go from here? What do we do with this?Scott: No, I've thought about this. There's the organizations I'm working with in Singapore, we've been talking about that at length and the broader conversation that needs to be had moving back from TikTok to algorithms and data generally is we need greater oversight and control of how our data is used to deliver us content of all kinds.Because people cannot bat an eyelid when they think of, alright, I wanna clean my house and I'm on Instagram and I got an ad for a cleaning product, cool. And in your ideal world, advertising connects you seamlessly to the things that can make your life easier. What you don't want is for an algorithm to see and know that a young person has been looking at a lot of videos that are around weight loss and now a targeted ad comes up for a weight loss supplement, cause that is how that data gets used also.And we need tools, I think like the one we're developing so that people can see what their algorithms are sending that. You should know. You should know if your algorithm is sending you three times more toxic masculinity content than someone else, if it's sending you more eating disorder content, if it's sending you more plastic surgery content.Because the first step in a battle is knowing what your algorithms are sending to you. And this issue only becomes more important because let's say you or I wanted to find out something factual, we go to Google.Gen Z uses things like TikTok for search. 40% of Gen Z prefers to use TikTok than Google for search, which means you are down the rabbit hole of the algorithm from day dot.So you need to know, but of course that information's never released to you. So it's pushing back against the opaqueness of the data that we provide and how that data is used to send us content because it's not in our, in the service of our health and connectedness and community. Again, it's in the service of, of money, and, and engagement. So I think that's the broader conversation, right? The data collected from us is not benign.Laura: Oh, absolutely. Wow. All right, Scott, on that cherry note, um, at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they have been really excited about lately. Um, So something they've been snacking on, either literally or metaphorically. Do you have something picked out?Scott: I do. So in Singapore, my favorite breakfast to have is kaya toast with some rather runny under soft boiled eggs with soy sauce and white pepper. It's a very common breakfast here, and I love it. It's so, so satisfying. I had it this morning. I'll have it again tomorrow.Laura: Sorry. What is the kind of toast did you say?Scott: It's called Kaya Toast. So it's like thick cuts of toast with butter that's called kaya butter. And it's slightly sweet. I think it has a more fun and complex flavour than regular butter. And you can dip that in eggs that are loaded up with white pepper and soy sauce.Laura: Got it.Scott: I love it.Laura: Oh, it sounds like they have a really amazing food culture over there. Like I've heard from people that they have like, you know, lots of different kinds of street food and stuff like that, so yeah. That sounds awesome. Mine is also a food so it's, I mean, it's only February at the time of recording, but like all the Easter stuff is now showing up in the shops and so I demolished a pack of like Doisy and Dam, which is like a brand of chocolate over here, mini eggs the other day. And they were so good. Like, I don't know if you get mini eggs in Australia, they're like solid chocolate eggs with like a candy kind of coating shell around them. And they're like all different kind of pastel kind of colors. Like yellow and pink and green and like eastery kind of spring colors.Scott: It's possible we do, I can't recall 'em off the top of my head,Laura: You're gonna tell me like you don't like chocolate or something.Scott: No, no, no. I love chocolate I'm not sillyLaura: So I think you would like, I know you would recognise them. So maybe you don't have them. You don't have them over there. All right, Scott, it's been really great to chat to you again. Can you let everybody know where they can find out more about you, your research group, or any of your publications? I will link to the study, the TikTok studies if they're published yet? Scott: They’re in the process of being, so the best place to follow along with the research my team does, including the TikTok work, is at my Twitter. It's @Scott1Griffiths. Or just search Google. Scott Griffiths, Scott Griffiths Body Image Research or something like that, and it will come up. That's the easiest way.Laura: I'll link to it so that it saves people the minefield of Googling stuff.Scott: Yeah.Laura: But yeah, so that's the best place to follow along on your Twitter and get updates about your research. I can't wait to read that. Well say. I can't wait to read it. I'm really depressed after talking to you about the state of social media.I mean, I was already bummed out about it, but this has just solidified that for me. So thank you for that. But otherwise, it was really great to talk to you and it's obviously really essential and important research that you're doing. So thank you for taking the time to share it with us.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. 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Today I’m talking to Dr. Hillary McBride. Hillary is a psychologist, a researcher, and podcaster, with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies, and embodiment. She’s the author of two books - ‘Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are’, and ‘The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Wholeness, Healing and Connection through Embodied Living’. She is on the teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia and hosts the podcast Other People’s Problems. Today, we’re speaking about embodiment, healing from trauma and loads of other really cool things!Find out more about Hillary’s work here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Order Hillary’s books here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here’s the transcript in full:Hillary: We could look at how convenient it is to assume that we are an image and then try to control that image when it causes us to forfeit the information that might say, no, I don't wanna participate in the system, or yes, I am hungry and I wanna eat that food even if it means that my body is not gonna appear the way that so and so expects it to. That the information on the inside is costly to stay connected to in a culture that is asking us to forfeit it, in order to belong in this kind of flattened, disembodied, two-dimensional version of, of being an image.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome back to Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they are nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Hillary McBride. Hillary is a psychologist, a researcher, and a podcaster with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies and embodiment. She's the author of two books: ‘Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are’, and that was published in 2017 and her latest book, ‘The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Wholeness, Healing and Connection Through Embodied Living’ came out in Fall 2021.Hillary is on the teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia, and she hosts the podcast, Other People's Problems. Today I'm talking to Hillary about embodiment, healing from trauma, and loads of other really cool things. So stay tuned.Before we get to our conversation with Hillary, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely reader and listener supported. We don't have sponsors or do adverts or anything like that. I don't make money from affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you anything you don't need. All I ask is that if you value the space and the community that we're building, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. 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I'll drop the link to the group subscriptions in the show notes so you can check that out if you and some pals have been on the fence, then this is a great option and it's go time.And last thing if you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes in this season, then please head over to iTunes and drop five stars. And I see in my statistics that you're all listening on Apple Podcasts anyway, so while you're over there, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a review. I might even read some of them out on the show. It just really helps more people find these conversations and become part of the Can I Have Another Snack community.All right, team. Thank you so much for your support. Here's my conversation with Hillary McBride.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Hillary, I'd love it if you could start by telling us who or what you are nourishing right now.Hillary: Well, I am nourishing myself and my toddler, and I am so much more attuned to what that means because, I am breastfeeding and I am always ferociously hungry all the time, and there is something about nourishing and kind of the, the literal transmutation of all the food as it comes into my body, out of my body, into her body, that, uh, shows me how deeply connected those two are, both the nourishing and the being nourished.Laura: Yeah, I haven't thought about it in that way that, I like that word that you use transmutation, um, and also breastfeeding a toddler I can relate to that. And yeah, just having to be really in tune with yourself, but also to a toddler and their needs.Hillary: Yes,Laura: It could be a lot.Hillary: You know, it can be a lot. It's wonderful. And I feel so privileged to, through motherhood, see and experience that connection of how much my attunement and my self care to my body actually literally supports her to thrive and be well. And there's something about that, even just the way you pose the question that highlights for me, the, the interdependence between us as bodies that I think we sometimes forget when we're just mulling about our days, thinking of ourselves as individuals. There's actually this inherent connection between all of us as bodies, and I think parenthood really, really brings that right up close to your face.Laura: Mm, yeah. I think a lot about interdependence in parenting. You know, from the perspective that that capitalism keeps us so sort of separate from one another. And prioritizes independence and, you know, trying to parent under late stage capitalism without family and community around is so fucking hard. So really, really hard that, yeah, like it just really for me has hammered home how interdependent we are.Hillary: Uh-huh. Yeah. You said it. That's exactly it.Laura: So Hillary, this is somewhat related, but your area of expertise is in embodiment, and embodiment is a term I've noticed recently, it's kind of buzzy. I'm seeing it show up everywhere, but I'm wondering if you could tell us how you understand and define embodiment.Hillary: Yes, I would be so privileged. So there's a couple different ways of defining it, and I'll give you a couple different definitions and then I'll, I'll tell you what I think is salient about them, but I really like the Merleau-Ponty definition, which is that embodiment is the perceptual experience of engagement of the body in the world. Or another way of describing it is the lived experience of engaging in the world as a body.Laura: Hm.Hillary: What both of those definitions have in common is that there is both a felt sense, experiential kind of body, you know, as it's known and lived and encountered and understood and sensed by me and a sociopolitical, contextual, cultural piece.It is, you know, how is all of that shaped by the landscape that I'm in, by the people that I'm in, by the stories of power and privilege that I encounter? So there's a dialectic between what felt sense is like in and through me, and then the world that I'm in. You know, it's really interesting to look at it through that lens as having both kind of this material, individual quality and a sociocultural and interpersonal quality, because I think it really breaks down the assumptions that we have, that our bodies are in a way, uniquely ours.We can have autonomy and agency over our bodies, but, but we also are in a world that is constantly saying things to us about what bodies are good and how to be, and how to shape movement and how to feed ourselves and what is desirable in terms of our appearance. And those things really get, you know, lodged inside of us in such a way that sometimes we forget that those stories come from culture and they feel like they're our own thoughts or our own identities.So I love thinking about embodiment as including these two pieces and in, in a way actually being the conversation between them.Laura: I love that, that kind of reciprocal relationship between our bodies and the, the context of our bodies. And I love the quote that you use in your book. I think it's, is it Teresa Silo? Is that how you,Hillary: ah-huh.Laura: Is that how you pronounce her name? Where you quote her as saying, or them as saying the body is not a thing we have, but an experience we are. And I always think there's kind of an irony in talking about and trying to define embodiment because as soon as we kind of put words to it, we're sort of, I don't know, what's the word that I'm looking for? Hillary: Like in an abstraction or we're losing something about the felt sense or the quality of it by trying to talk about it or think aboutLaura: Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly it. We're turning it into this like, academic thing when it's really, like you've said, it's a felt sense, it's an experience, so I just wanted to highlight the sort of, the irony in us talking about embodiment.Hillary: Oh, I'm so glad that you said that because it reminds me of something else that I often say when I'm talking about embodiment, which is to say, you know, instead of me describing it, how about I tell you about, you know, that time 30 minutes ago or two hours ago, when you really knew that you needed a drink of water. And the quality of the sensation and your awareness of that sensation, and then your action to go meet that need to go get yourself a glass of water or not. And all of the stories around you that impacted why you knew what that sensation was like or didn't know and why you did something about it or not.It's like the, you know, sometimes because we get stuck in the academic definitions and we lose the felt sense quality, we actually understand embodiment when we come back to the, the sensory memory, the procedural memory, the qualitative nature of being a body, because that as much, you know, some of us have harder times accessing that, it may actually be a little bit more accessible to us than all of the, you know, the floral or abstracted language that we use to talk about this thing, which is kind of our aliveness and it as it's felt and sensed.Laura: And I love that word that you used, aliveness. And it makes me think of how I think and how I conceptualise embodiment in some of the work that I do around feeding and working with, with children and families is, you know, I think of embodiment a lot about a baby or a toddler who is just so, you know, they're all feeling, they're all in their body. There's no kind of like, they haven't quite internalised messages around shame and, you know, these social scripts that we pick up and, I think of animals as well as, you know, being really, embodied in a very positive way. Obviously, of course, we're all embodied, but you know, as you alluded to our experiences of embodiment can be, can lean more positively or more negatively depending on, again, some of the social scripts that we've been handed, the sociopolitical context that we find ourselves in, but I wondered if it would just, if it was helpful for some of the listeners to, to especially anyone who's parent or been around children or animals to, you know, connect with that idea that, you know, we're born embodied and, and, and we have this really strong sense of, of positive embodiment when, especially when we're little. And then, you know, Niva Piran's research tells us that as we get closer to, um, particularly for girls, as we get closer to puberty, and we start acting on the body instead of being in, you know, acting from the body, that, yeah, that's where the, those ruptures in our embodiment begin.Hillary: Mm-hmm.Laura: I wonder if you could speak to maybe some of the other ways our experiences of embodiment are shaped both at the individual level, but also from that broader sociopolitical context that we've touched on.Hillary: Well, I think that the most obvious things that we could look at have to do with our isms around power, how power is distributed. So, which bodies are considered desirable, which bodies are forgotten socially, and again, that might seem kind of abstract until, until all of a sudden you're in a wheelchair and you realise that city planning didn't necessarily think about all the ways that people who use mobility aids need to get into buildings.That there's something that's communicated there about which bodies and how bodies move through space that's not really considered by those who have the, the most social power. So we think about like ableism and racism and sizeism, sexism and you know, there's just so many isms that are proliferated in our culture that we don't really even think about, especially if we benefit from them in some way.So there's that quality of it. Of course, there's the way that media and parents and peers are vessels for those messages about what is desirable. That's considered the tripartite model. But looking at these three different streams of influence that disseminate messages about ideal bodies, about good bodies, about what is valuable culturally.And whenever I think about the tripartite model, the, you know what's interesting about it if you were to see it visually, is it places you right, the individual at the centre of these streams of information coming at you, there is these arrows of media. You know, parents or caregivers and peers, colleagues, right? Your friends, they're pointing at you, but you are also in one of those categories, likely, if not more, for another person. And so we are handed this information and then we are handing it to each other. Just based on the ways that we use greetings and how we comment on other people's appearance and what we say about their eating and um, their feeding of themselves and their movement, and the kinds of things that we, we praise and the kinds of things that we are silent about or criticise.So there is this really interesting soup that we're in. But if we follow those arrows back from us to where they come from, we see structures around, you know, hierarchies of body that were created many millennia ago based on who was able to leave or control the body the best. Who is seen as actually having the ability to conquer or subdue the body in terms of its animal nature, it's sensory qualities, it's sensuality. In some ways it’s mystery. And all of it, it seems, stems back to that, could this one group of people conquer their body better than someone else, and then the assumption or the conferring of power based on that, right? That this is somehow superior.Laura: Yeah, I think a lot about it in terms of, you know, the, the cultures of domination that we live in. But I think the way that you're expanding it, there is almost, you know, the, the genesis of all of this was domination over one group's own bodies before then that ripple effect goes out to dominate other bodies and animals and the natural world.Hillary: Yes, and I would argue that that might even come from before, that the domination of the body of the earth, the sense that the earth is a body in its own way. That is in a way kind of our original mother as a species. And the earth's body needs to be objectified and conquered, which teaches us to objectify and conquer our own bodies, and then consequently punish the people who can't do that as being kind of unruly or somehow lacking status or privilege or power.Laura: Wow. Okay. I wasn't expecting to go there, but we did. Hillary in, your second book, The Wisdom of Your Body, you talk about the ways that we learn to view our bodies as an image. You know, we use the term body image all the time, which when you think about it, is fundamentally objectifying, right?Hillary: Mm-hmm.Laura: I'm wondering if you can share, you know, how this happens. How do we come to view our bodies as objects separate from, from us and, what does this do to our experience of embodiment?Hillary: It is something so funny to think about, hey, when we start actually looking at the language, like body image has been used as shorthand for how we relate to our bodies, but we are not just images. We are not just in relationship with our appearance and we have so much more dimensionality to us than than what is visible to us, visible about us on the outside and how we perceive and relate to that.So my relationship to that term has evolved since, really because of my own journey through eating disorder recovery and feeling like I wanted to leave behind the two-dimensional way of relating to my body as an image and move inside into a kind of interiority of the body. And what's fascinating about the research about that is that it seems that that actually kind of inoculates us against eating disorders.You might think that, you know, not working on eating disorders as an issue would be missing a major construct in a cornerstone of the work. But it seems that there is something about leaving ourselves and seeing ourselves just as an image that is, as a, a kind of pathology in a way, and that there is a, a wholeness that is lacking in our relationship and experience of ourselves unless we include.All of the other qualities, the felt senses, the interoception, really what it's like to live and be us from the inside out. So when I think about body image, I often very closely think about objectification and self-objectification and the way that we learn to see ourselves from the outside.Seeing ourselves through the gaze of the other, but also, I think you could argue, especially if you're familiar with Foucault's work, like looking at the body through the gaze of those who have the power and those who are most interested in subduing and controlling and disciplining the body. But we learn to take the position of those who have the most power, those who could hurt us, those who could approve of us or judge us. And we begin to see ourselves and police our through their eyes, and it is through assuming the position of this external gaze that we lose or leave behind some of that other more subtle, nuanced information that can only be felt and lived through us and consequently actually might serve to disrupt some of those systems of power.We could look at how convenient it is to assume that we are an image and then try to control that image when it causes us to forfeit the information that might say, no, I don't wanna participate in the system, or yes, I am hungry and I wanna eat that food even if it means that my body is not gonna appear the way that so and so expects it to. That the information on the inside is costly to stay connected to in a culture that is asking us to forfeit it, in order to belong in this kind of flattened, disembodied, two-dimensional version of, of being an image.So there is something that I think that's really important here about recognising, again, what you brought up earlier of power and social control, and the way that even receiving ourselves as simply an image is a byproduct of a social context in which we are rewarded for being less of a body because we are often then more compliant. Laura: Yeah, there's a lot to think about there. I think have to like process that a little bit after we finish our call. I suppose what was coming up for me there is, you know, in the age of hyper information and social media and you know, when, when we're so bombarded with our own image, images of other people, that are often presented in these really like one-dimensional ways.Hillary: Mm.Laura: You know, it's so much easier to self objectifyHillary: Yes.Laura: Than it is to be positively embodied or embodied in any sense, really. I'm just curious, you know, how when you're swimming upstream like this, you know, what do you find to be helpful? Because I think, you know, cognitively we can all understand, wow, that's really messed up when you put it in those terms. But again, embodying something different is so much harder. So, you know, where can we even begin with that, do you think?Hillary: Yeah. Well, my discipline will betray me when I say this because, or I should say I will betray my discipline in a way when I say this, but we, you know, we are constantly in development. The idea that development is only something that happens in these critical and sensitive periods of our life is actually just, it's not true scientifically. And I understand why we do it culturally to say, you know, here's where there is so much that is happening. We need to be protective of people who are vulnerable because their systems are, are changing so much and it's setting up so much of the rest of their lives. But we will be in development, we will be experiencing developmental transitions for the rest of our lives, including death.Death is a developmental transition. When we look at Niva Piran's Developmental Theory of Embodiment, there is so much that we can borrow at different phases of the lifespan. And why I think that's hopeful is because it gives us a guide to the places that we can, we can. Intersect with interventions and support and resources and where we can direct our attention to support ourselves, to continue to reclaim some of the aspects of being a body that have been left behind.So that includes looking at the social domain. What are the places where I can experience the freedom to be in my body and to be understood in the challenges of being a body in the social climate? And where do I experience having social power? Right? Who? Who are the people who understand my lived experience and can validate the lived reality of oppression and marginalisation or, you know, can affirm the goodness of my body, even if the larger social narrative and dominant culture is either silent or oppressive to what my experience of my body is like. So there's the social power aspect, there's the mental, mental freedom aspect. You know, negotiating with some of the, the constructs that we carry inside, being critical about the thinking that we have and the places that we learned that thinking, assessing social discourse.Um, you know, the irony with this is, I had an eating disorder therapist for quite some time who said women with eating disorders are philosopher queens. And there are, you know, I am sure lots of places where that does not apply. But in my experience, and I think what she was trying to say to me was not that there was an absence of thought, but that I was really up in my mind.And if we can be curious about what is going on up in our minds, and if we can harness the criticism that is often turned towards our bodies and actually redirect it to the place that it's due, which is these really harmful social constructs and experiences and distributions of power, then the mechanism of being thoughtful and thinking critically does not have to disappear. It can just get redirected to the place that it deserves to be redirected. We can learn to see the social landscape for the problems and the toxicity that it has and build something new instead of directing that energy towards our bodies, thinking our bodies were ever a problem.And then lastly, of course, the physical freedom piece. If we create experiences where we encounter being in a body and can notice that that is pleasurable and is good and we can work on building attunement towards ourselves, I think that that inoculates us against the pervasive image culture. These are all different ways that we bring our attention back into creating experiences both in ourselves and between us and others that make it hospitable to be in our bodies. And help us remember what we knew right from the beginning in our earliest phases of development, which is that our body is full of communication. Our body is us. Our body can be trusted, our body is wise. Our body knows the way. Our body deserves to be safe and is actually ultimately, I think, interested in creating safety for all of us.Laura: I love that. And again, so many threads that we could, we could pull on there, but I loved especially what you, what you were saying about, well, there were two, two pieces that, that really stood out for me. I think one of which was just this idea of where we are so quick to criticise and tear ourselves down. Yeah. How can we externalise that? How can we turn that towards these oppressive systems that exist outside of our bodies that are making us feel a particular way about our bodies? And then the second piece, you said so elegantly, but I kind of was coming back to this idea of community and finding safety in people who can, um, other people who share similar lived experiences to us, who can affirm our experiences, who can show solidarity with us, who can hold us and, and say, you know, there is nothing wrong with your body. There is nothing wrong with the way that you show up in the world. It's everything else outside of of us that's messed up. and yeah, just, just be in community with one, one another. Kind of almost going full circle back to what we talked about at the very beginning, sort of thinking about interdependence and, and how we all kind of fit together in the sort of wider human tapestry,Hillary: Yes. Yes, exactly.Laura: And I mentioned to you off mic, a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are parents or have children in their lives, and I know you're a parent yourself, and I wonder from your perspective, what do you think are the most important things that adults can do to support kids' sense of positive embodiment?You know, we've talked a lot about at the sort of collective level, and there's a lot that needs to change there, but I'm wondering if you have any nuggets for parents, you know, any considerations or anything that they can do to help their kids maintain a sense of being in their bodies, a sense of their bodies as their homes as this place of safety.Hillary: Well, there's a few things that come to mind, and I'm hoping that that means that even if all of them don't feel accessible, then hopefully one, one does for the parents out there. So I think a really important thing to do is to affirm how they are already listen. So when a kid says, “I'm hungry”, you can say, “Wow, you're really listening to your body. Thank you so much for telling me”. You know, that doesn't necessarily mean that we do whatever they want because we live in families and we have limitations, and we have schedules, and we have all sorts of things that we need to fit in and negotiate. But simply saying, “I'm so glad you're listening. Thank you for telling me”. I think what that does is it protects, protects the knowing even if we have to set a boundary and say, you know, “It's gonna be a little while until we can have a snack because we're actually driving, we don't have anything in the car right now. But you know you're hungry and you're doing such a good job. Listening to that and telling me”. What we don't want to have happen is to signal in any way to children that they have to disqualify their bodily knowing to stay in connection with us because that's often what happens in terms of an attachment framework, right? Children are so sensitive to what their caregivers need in order for them to be considered pleasing and when children perceive their caregiver as being disappointed or scared or ashamed or something because of the information they're giving them, they're gonna learn very, very quickly not to give them that information. And it's not a far jump from, I'm not gonna give that information, to I'm suppressing that information, to I don't notice it at all.So simply being able to say to your children, “You do know you're tired. I believe you, that you're hungry. I am so glad you're listening. Ooh. What does it feel like in your tummy when you're hungry? How do you know? What is it like? Is it like a growling?” You know? Right. Even just being in the experience of it with them to thicken their awareness of it is a great way to preserve that and let them know that them paying attention to their bodies will not cut them off from connection to you.Laura: So the other day, so we send Avery, my almost three year old, with a packed lunch to his daycare setting. And the other day he came home and he said to us, “I ate one carrot”. And he was like, so proud of eating this carrot. And of course, I never praise based on, you know, what he has or hasn't eaten and I'm, you know, maintain this very food neutral approach. So I was really surprised by this and I did a little bit of interrogating it and, you know, I've actually had to go and speak to daycare because they are, you know, pressuring him to eat. Which really crosses so many boundaries for me in terms of not respecting his autonomy. Not respecting his voice, you know, he had said no and he was told, well, you just have to eat one carrot. And then obviously this was reinforced with praise before he came home and said, “I ate one carrot”, you know, I had to sit with why this really played on my mind. And it's, you know, for the reasons that you're describing that overriding someone's no, overriding their body autonomy can become a sort of slippery slope to them. You know, not, not being able to recognise their own needs and suppressing their needs and or performing, you know, for adult’s praise or adult’s validation, and that's so much bigger than respecting their hunger and fullness cues. That's just one tiny part of this work, I think. So yeah, that was just an example that came to mind.Hillary: Thank you so much for sharing that because I think it, you know, where it takes me is into the complexity that parents often bring to the conversation of, you know, there are times I have to override their cues. Like they're saying, no, I don't wanna have my diaper changed and they've got a poopy diaper. You're like, this would actually be negligent if I didn't, like you actually can't make that call right now, but how important it is to say, you know, “I really hear your no, I really hear that you don't want me to change your diaper. I'm so glad you're telling me there's something about that that doesn't feel good for you. You can always, always tell me, and I'm always going to listen to you. And there are some situations where even if something is uncomfortable or hard for you, I have to help you do it because it is for your safety, because it cares for your body, and I want for you to know that even though I'm gonna be caring for your body in this way, I still believe that you don't want me to, and I'm hearing you, and I'm so glad you're telling me”.Because I think what often happens is if we have to, we are in those situations where we do have to override the no that the parenting kind of reaction that we might naturally wanna have is, I'm gonna shut down your, no, then I'm gonna tell you, you shouldn't say no because it's actually kind of uncomfortable for me as a parent to say to you. Yes, you're allowed to disagree with me, but I'm still gonna do what I'm doing. Right? That's a complicated thing to feel and we can feel like it would just be easier for them to not say anything because it's too uncomfortable for us. So being able to say, you can keep telling me no. You can tell me just how much you don't like it. I believe you. I believe you. Tell me what it is as I'm changing your diaper. What is it about it that you really don't like? Like keeping them connected to themselves and keeping them connected to you while you're also prioritising their health and safety? I think it is possible to do it all.Laura: Yeah, no, and thank you for adding that nuance of, you know, there are times where, especially around care tasks, where we can validate what they're expressing about how strongly they don't want to do something and how that feels really uncomfortable or really annoying or, you know, just not what they want to be doing in that moment.And we have to hold a boundary because it's really important for hygiene or, you know, for their safety or, or whatever it is. And so there's definitely that, that piece of it. And you know, something that I've been thinking about with, with Avery, is, you know, in terms of his body boundaries and helping him assert that.Well, there's two things actually. We're practicing saying things like, “I'm the boss of my body”, which I know is gonna backfire at some point when he, you know, when it comes to washing his hair or getting in the bath or something like that. But yeah, just reminding him that, you know, he is in charge of what crosses that body boundary.And another thing that I've come across lately, I don't know if you've discovered this song yet, but it's called The Boundary Song.Hillary: Ooh, I haven't, I'm gonna have to look it up.Laura: Yeah, it's, um, it's called the Boundary Song. I'll link to it. I think it's Hopscotch is like the YouTube video, but it's basically the words, the lyrics are basically, please stop. I don't like that. I'm feeling uncomfortable. I need more space. And then itHillary: Uh, Yeah.Laura: Not around me. Don't take it personally. It's just a boundary. That's a boundary. And my, not even three year old has like memorised this song and, you know, we're trying to practice like different context in which you might say something like that. And again, it could all go horribly wrong and backfire, but, you know, I think what I'm connecting this back to is just, you know, giving them the tools to express their voice to help solidify their body autonomy, to solidify their body boundaries.And, that feels like a really salient piece around maintaining that positive experience of embodiment that connection to their bodies. Not letting their body boundaries be violated, you know, with the caveat that sometimes we have to do that in a caring way, for hygiene and whatever else.So anyway, I went off on a bit of a monologue there. I'm not really sure what my point was, do you wanna bring it back, Hillary?Hillary: I love the place that we're in, in the conversation, which is looking at both how we protect in a few different ways, right? Because there is a way of protecting that is ‘I'm gonna honour your boundary because you said no, I'm gonna stop’. And there's also a kind of protecting, which, you know, like you said, around care practices and just the nuance and complexity of that, and I think it's important that we're making a space where we can talk about how those fit intentionally with each other, what they bring up in us as adults. And also then subsequently what we weren't given as kids.Because many of the times when these things are hard for us as parents, it's because they're new, because we're having to chart a new path and there is something kind of prophetic and transformational in being in the space that's uncomfortable and foreign. So I'm just appreciating, holding the complexity here.I think the last thing that I'll wanna say around embodiment in children is around creating experiences for free play, for being silly, for jumping, for, you know, unrestricted movement, for experiencing sensation and wide ranges of sensation like the, the developmental literature says that the more we encounter in a sensory capacity, the more ways that we learn to have mastery and agency in our bodies, the more autonomy, the more fullness, the more goodness we encounter in our bodies.So a wide range of activities, movement, spaces getting dirty, getting loud, being silly, playing, coordinated movements, right? Even being able to master a task because we practice something over and over and over again and get good at it, but not at the exclusion of free and unrestricted play, like just as many body experiences we can have.I think that that, you know, that's something that serves us well in our lives and so maybe that's a good piece of advice for parents who are really committed to having their kids be in figure skating and they do a lot of figure skating and over and over and over and over again. Like yes, there might be a sense of, um, mastery. But what about the spaces where there is novel movement or what about the spaces where there is unrestricted kind of free unobserved movement? Or maybe for parents who are really good at letting their kids be wild and free and unrestricted, where are the spaces where kids are learning a task and can feel competence in and through their bodies.And so just thinking about the spectrum and trying to create range, I think that that's, that's really important. It takes a little bit of thought on our part, but I think it goes a really long way.Laura: Yeah. I really appreciate that addition. And yeah, I've been thinking about these kids that I see around, they're always with their dad. I think it's their dad, at least I hope it's their dad. And they must be about, I don't know, like 9 and maybe 11, somewhere around there. And I fondly referred to dad as aggressive sports dad,Hillary: Oh, okay. Yes. I know the type. Okay.Laura: He's like, I see them like at the pool. I see them at the tennis court. I see them at the park. And the dad is like super militantly, like focused on like teaching them skills around sports, like, he's clearly really, really passionate about sports, but you can just see the kids like kind of, uh,Hillary: Mm-hmm.Laura: At how restrained and controlled and, um, kind of like meticulous they're being asked to be. And obviously I'm kind of projecting here like, you know, or using conjecture to make assumptions here, but it does feel like they just wanna run around and climb a tree or like jump.Hillary: Yes. Right, right.Laura: But yeah, we all know an aggressive sports dad. But Hillary, I'm really conscious of your time and I just have a couple quick questions I wanna ask you to wrap up. So the first is, I would love it if you could share a practice with us that you personally like or that you found in your work as a therapist that helps people with that sense of embodiment, with that sense of my body as my home.Hillary: Yeah, Yeah. Two really, really quickly. Uh, one, putting my hands on my body and talking to myself, greeting myself in the morning, in the evening, saying I'm so glad to be with you. I wanna care for you. Can you keep talking to me? Right. Whatever it is that we wanna say to build relationship with our bodily selves, like honouring my body as a subject, not just an object. And then the other one is dancing. I just love having music on and moving my body in a way that really helps me discharge excess energy or stress from the day. For anyone who's familiar with trauma work, we know that moving, shaking, activation in our major muscle groups, like that's actually a way to release energy that is lingering from stressful or demanding events.So there's that side of it, but then there's also the freedom and the pleasure and the sense of enjoyment and you know, how it invites me into self-expression and connection and a sense of yeah, just enjoying being a body. So touching my own body and talking to myself and dancing.Laura: Oh, I love both of those things, and they're definitely things that I try and, yeah, check in with as well. My last sort of serious interview question for you is who or what is nourishing you right now?Hillary: Mm. You know, just this week I had some really, really important conversations with my partner and he really listened to me and really tended to me, and there was something about feeling unshakable support and emotional attunement that felt nourishing to me on such a soul level, that I have to think of the relational. Again, that's my new kind of my therapist disposition and my discipline there. But I feel so nourished by deep and rich, attuned connection. It helps me feel seen and known and loved and safe and, um, nourished.Laura: I really love that. That's so special. I'm so glad that you have that.Hillary: Thank you. Me too.Laura: Okay, so just a fun question to wrap up. So, at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they're snacking on. So it can be a literal snack, it can be a podcast, a movie, a show, whatever you're into at the moment. Is there something fun you'd like to share with us?Hillary: Ugh. You know what? I'm having a real cake moment in my life right now. I think. I don't know what it is. Yes, I know.Laura: I thought For a second you were using cake as a euphemism, and I was a bit confused, but then I realised you meant actual cake. Okay.Hillary: Cake. Actual cake. I just had so many years where I really missed out and so we've been making up excuses for reasons to get a cake. So, um, you know, we're just having a lot of cake around here and I love it so much.I'm like having breakfast cake and after dinner cake and sometimes cake with lunch and just really, really enjoying all sorts of different kinds and qualities, and no grocery store cheap cake is beneath me, but I'm also, I like some of the fancy ones, so I'm just trying, trying cake.Laura: Oh, I love it. Breakfast cake.Hillary: Yes,Laura: Genius. That's a stroke of genius. Uh, real quick, I'll share mine. So I think yeah, this is really connected to what we have been talking about today, which is that I've recently taken Avery to toddler dance class, like a toddler ballet class, and I am super conscious of how toxic dance spaces can be in general, but this is a very cute, very safe space where they can just move their bodies in whatever way they like. And you know, I've taken him to a few different sort of dance space classes and things like that, and he really hasn't connected to it. But this class in particular, he was just kind of in his element, twirling and jumping and leaping. And he, you know, he asked if he could put on like the tutu skirt and he was just having the best time. So, um, super special to see that.Hillary: Yes, it sounds like it. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. That just brought me so much joy knowing about that and picturing him there.Laura: it's very, very, sweet. Hillary, could you please share with everyone how they can find out more about you and your work and where they can find you?Hillary: Yeah. You can find me online at hillarylmcbride.com,, on social media, Hillary Lianna McBride on Instagram or Hillary L McBride on Twitter, or maybe it's the other way around, I can never remember. Have a look at those names. Some combination of those names will get you somewhere to me and my work.And, then I've got books, wherever books are sold and podcasts, you can always search my name in the search tool in wherever you listen to podcasts. And both the podcasts that I have produced and the ones I've been on will show up.Laura: And we will link to all your social media and where to find your books and your podcast in the show notes so that, yeah, there won't be any confusion over where to find you.Hillary: Thank you.Laura: Hillary, it was so great to talk to you. I love your book, The Wisdom of Your Body. And I really recommend it to all my clients that I'm working with. So thank you so much for spending some time with us today.Hillary: It was my pleasure. I loved every minute of our conversation.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. 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Joining me on the CIHAS pod this week is writer and poet, Amy Key. Amy has a new book coming out in April called Arrangements in Blue, which explores living in the absence of romantic love. She also wrote this incredible essay for the Vittles Substack called In Praise of Cravings which I was a little skeptical of at first, as you’ll hear us talk about, but which ended up transforming the way I thought about cravings. Amy subverts the idea that we should pathologise our cravings and invites us to explore how food can be a gateway to satisfying non-food cravings as well. Amy also talks really openly about her own relationship with food and how she experienced an eating disorder as a teen, and how part of that healing now is trying on the word fat and noticing how that feels. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Amy’s work here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Pre-order Amy’s book here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here’s the transcript in full:Amy: And you're sort of doing all this mental gymnastics that, um, for me just became a huge waste of intellectual effort. And I thought to myself, I'm just not prepared give food that bit of my brain anymore and that much time.I'd rather focus it on making delicious food that I enjoy to eat, that I enjoy preparing, that I want to share with other people. And also I'm not prepared to be hungry because if I am hungry, I'm thinking about food all the time. And I, you know, I find that I don't really, don't really have like much snacking type habits because I'm satisfied in a way that I don't think I'd previously been. And it was, that was really liberating for me. Just saying, ah, I'm gonna let, just let all that bit of my brain go, cuz let you know, life's too short for me to devote all this brain power to it and I've got other things I could be doing.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to another episode of the Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas. I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to the writer and poet Amy Key.Amy wrote this incredible essay for the Vittles Substack called In Praise of Cravings, and as you'll hear us talk about, when I first read the essay, I was kind of skeptical about it, but there was this moment in it that transformed the way that I thought about what Amy was saying, and now I can't get the idea of trusting cravings and leaning into cravings out of my head.Amy subverts the idea that we should pathologise our cravings and invites us to explore how food can be a gateway to satisfying non-food cravings as well. So like how creating someone's favourite dish can help us feel connected to someone we miss, and someone who we're longing. Amy also talks really openly about her own relationship with food and how she experienced an eating disorder as a teen, and how part of that healing now is trying on the word fat and noticing how that feels.So we'll get to Amy in just a minute, but first of all, a couple of notes. This is your last shout for my Raising Embodied Eater's Workshop on the 21st of February. It's a 90 minute workshop where we're going to be reflecting on your own relationship with food and your body growing up and thinking about how you want to parent your kids around food and around their bodies.We'll talk about how food rules pressure restriction and trying to micromanage how much and what our kids eat can backfire and harm the relationship with food, and it could also make picky and fussy eating worse. We'll talk about how to support kids innate hunger and fullness cues with flexible structure. We'll think about how to let go of the pressure to feed kids perfectly. We'll talk a lot about embodiment and supporting body autonomy, and also think about ways to respond to food and body shaming comments from family and friends, plus loads and loads more. I'm actually not sure I'm gonna fit it all in. We'll figure it out and there will be some time in the end to ask questions too. So if we don't get to cover absolutely everything we can, you know, answer it in the q and a at the end. And if that sounds good to you, the link to sign up is in the show notes and transcript. Um, it's also on my Instagram bio, so if you're, I don't know, on Instagram, then click click through the link in the bio. It's 15 pounds and the recording will be available for a week after to catch up. You'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters download, which is like a 10 page PDF with loads of helpful things that you can share with family and friends. And, um, like I said, there will be some time at the end to answer your questions, so all the links are in the notes, in the transcript and in my Instagram bio.And just before we get to Amy, I wanted to ask a quick favour. If you've been enjoying these episodes, then please think about leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. It lets people who are on the fence about listening know that it's worth their time. Just a few sentences would really mean a lot and help us grow the Can I Have Another Snack family. So thank you if you do that. I super appreciate it. It's a really low-key, we low-key way that you can support the podcast and the newsletter without becoming a paid subscriber, if that's not something that's available to you right now.All right, team, I think you're gonna really love this episode. So let's get to today's guest, poet, and writer Amy Key.MAIN EPISODELaura: Amy, I'd love it if you could share with us who or what you're nourishing right now.Amy: So, I am nourishing my garden by planting all the bulbs that I did not manage to plant before Christmas, because I had a really bad case of flu. And one of the things that makes me so happy in the spring is seeing all the spring bulbs come up, and I hate, hate, hate winter, so it's kind of like a little present to myself that says the future has hope and bright colours in it.Um, so I've been doing that and also I've moved some of the plants that were not flourishing in the places I'd originally placed them. I've moved them into the communal spaces of the garden and I really hope that they'll take root there. So that's what I'm nourishing right now.Laura: Oh, I love that. First of all, I'm slightly relieved that I'm not the only person who is only just thinking in January about my bulbs. I literally overwintered my tomatoes this weekend and we're like almost at the end of January. SoAmy: That's amazing. Are they still doing their business?Laura: Yeah. So I discovered that. So I live in a flat in London. My balcony for whatever reason, I think because it's almost like an internal balcony. So like only one side is exposed and it has like a little microclimate going on, which I think is because I'm losing all the heat through my patio door, but it's like five degrees warmer than like what the weather app is telling me the weather is, right.So, um, yeah, I've got like eight strawberry plants. They're not producing anything, but like, they were like runners from last year and I've got a couple of tomato plants that I think I can salvage. I mean, they're looking a bit ropey, but I think I can salvage. But you know what, the best thing that happened to me at the weekend was I found a little like potted plant that I got from M&S last year that was full of daffodils. And I like tied a knot in the dead daffodils, threw them in a Sainsbury's bag. And then this past weekend I saw the little, the little bulbs sprouting so I've replanted those. Happy days,Amy: I love it.Laura: And I've got a whole bunch of bulbs as well. I spent way too much money at the Garden Center, but that's, that's, this is how we get our kicks. Right.Amy: I love that idea that things are just like waiting under the surface to surprise you. We don’t know where they're gonna come up.Laura: And this is such a perfect segue because you alluded well, you didn't allude, you outright said , I hate winter. And that you're waiting for that hope, that promise that that spring offers of a new life and activity. And, and I think that's something that you also alluded to in your essay that you wrote for Vittles called In Praise of Cravings.Amy: Yes,Laura: I wonder if you could tell us a bit about that essay and really what you were trying to communicate through idea of cravings.Amy: Yeah. So, um, maybe I'll talk a little bit about where it came from. So I was at a family member's house and there were little prompts posted about their flat on cupboards and on the fridge that interrupted the person before they opened the fridge door or opened the cupboard and said, stop, think about it. Are you depressed? Are you thirsty? Are you angry? Are you bored? And I found, I found these prompts so depressing because they were, you know, basically trying to interrupt this desire from a kind of moral point of view, you know, that the tone of it felt a bit cruel to me. And I thought, oh, I wish those things weren't there.I wish those things, I wish that everyone could just be in their kitchen. You know, might, they might wanna snack, they might want to eat a stick of celery. They might want to open the cupboards and think about something they'd really like to make for dinner. And I feel like if I was always interrupted in this way, it would make me feel very bad about myself.So I, that's why I wanted to write about cravings from the perspective of thinking about it in like much more colourful, pleasurable ways, you know that you can follow an impulse and you can trust your body to tell you what you might need in that moment, and that that should be free of any judgment. Laura: Yeah. Oh, I can imagine the scene like it sounds like this person maybe has a trickier, complicated relationship with food and they're, they're sending these, well, I guess we're, we're sort of instructed right by diet culture that our, our cravings, our appetite, our hunger is unreliable. It's untrustworthy. We shouldn't ever indulge it, God forbid that we trust our bodies. Right? And that they needed this. Yeah this physical reminder or like this physical manifestation of the food police on their cupboards to interrupt, that yeah, their desires, their, their need for pleasure, which, which is exactly how diet culture functions, but it's, I can imagine that that was really confronting.Amy: Yeah, it was, and I think, because it's taken me a long time to break down some of the shame I feel in eating and like, because my body is a fat body, um, you know, there's always that sense that I should be denying myself food nonstop, let alone the food that I would like to eat. Or that, you know, there's an assumption that if you have a fat body, you are greedy, um, or that you are eating the wrong things in the wrong way at the wrong time. And that made me really sad because actually food is such an exciting, like place for expression, for creativity and for like friendship and communication. And just downright pleasure, you know, like taste sensations, , all of those things. So all that was all kind of in my mind and it was almost, I felt almost like, oh God, I just wanna write a manifesto, if you like. That is just about being in search of, of what it is I want and, and owning that.Laura: Hmm. I love that idea and this sense of kind of conviction really comes through in the essay of like, I own my appetite, I own my desires, I own my cravings. And that it felt really self assured and confident. But from what you were saying there, it sounds like that wasn't necessarily always the case in your relationship with food, and I wondered if you'd be comfortable sharing a little bit more about your relationship with food was like maybe growing up and, and later into to adulthood.Amy: Yeah, I think like, as was the case for like lots of women, probably of my generation who were you know, children and teenagers in the eighties and nineties, there was always dieting in the house. There was always this sense of like, uh, having a body that should be taken in hand because it got out of control, um, and that, you know, those cycles of that happening all the time. And, you know, I just had like a quite average body. And then as I got into my later teens I developed an eating disorder, you know, ate as little as I could, became very thin and was rewarded for, for being thin. I was rewarded with attention, you know, concerned attention, and, um, I was rewarded by the sense of being able to wear clothes that were much smaller and having access to all of that, that too. But that period of my life didn't last very long, and I remember as I was like a young adult in, you know, in my early teens and sort of settling back into what was probably just my normal body, which wasn't a thin body, um, feeling like I'd somehow like lost this battle of wills and I'd somehow not mastered the art of having a body that was a respectable body in society, um, if that makes sense. And it, it's taken me a really, really long time to try and, unlearn that, like to try and let go of this goal that I probably had at some point, which was, oh, I know that I can be thin, so I'm gonna try and return to that teenage body again. And it'll probably happen at some point in the future if I just, you know, work, work hard enough. And it was, it was through really making sure that I engaged with content showed fat people, um, and you know, like the body positivity movement for, for all its faults has in some ways been really, really helpful for me. So, replacing the negative images with really positive ones and just making sure that a, I broaden my own scope of what is beautiful, for example, what is good and what is, um, you know, what wellness should mean has really helped me, I think, become a lot more accepting of where my, you know, where my body is and helped me break free of a cycle, I guess, of denial, of contrition of you know, self admonishment that just made me unhappy, but also just was terribly draining on the brain because I found that I filled up so much of my brain with ideas about what I was going to eat, that I sort of lost any enjoyment in eating. So the thing that's changed for me in terms of like how I eat is that previously, and I think for much of my life, cause I wasn't trusting what I felt like I wanted, what I desired, I would be like mentally trying to like problem solve something else that might fix that desire, but it could never, never be fixed.You know, it might be eating several different things as, and then realising that no, no, I'm still hungry. So like you go to the fridge and you get this one thing, and you're like, if I'd just eaten a slice of toast with some butter on it, that probably would've completely fixed that craving that I had.But instead, I ate four raspberries, a handful of nuts, a square of cheese, and it just gets very, very elaborate. And then, and you're sort of doing all this mental gymnastics that, um, for me just became a huge waste of intellectual effort. And I thought to myself, I'm just not prepared give food that bit of my brain anymore and that much time.I'd rather focus it on making delicious food that I enjoy to eat, that I enjoy preparing, that I want to share with other people. And also I'm not prepared to be hungry because if I am hungry, I'm thinking about food all the time. And I, you know, I find that I don't really, don't really have like much snacking type habits because I'm satisfied in a way that I don't think I'd previously been. And it was, that was really liberating for me. Just saying, ah, I'm gonna let, just let all that bit of my brain go, cuz let you know, life's too short for me to devote all this brain power to it and I've got other things I could be doing.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And it sounds as though letting go of that anxiety and fear and concern about food and, and not letting it take up as much space in your brain open things up for you is thatAmy: Oh yeah, definitely, I think so. Yeah, you know, it makes me want to say, for example, write, write about food. It makes me want to grow food, or talk to people about it without that sense of it being a problem that I need to resolve.Laura: Yeah.Amy: I do have a fat body and some people think that that's not okay. But I am grateful to live in the body that I live in and I haven't got a perfect reaction to the way in which fatness is perceived like far from it, but I have certainly become a lot more relaxed about other people's opinions about how my own body should look because cuz it's none of their business and it's certainly none of their business what I eat.Laura: Oh, I'm so excited by everything that you've just said there that, um, I'm trying to figure out where I want to dig deeper, and I think one thing that that stood out for me, and it's something that I kind of bump up against quite a lot in, in my clinical work and just through conversations with people who've read my books, is the, the idea that you alluded to where you've attained a thin body. Now in your case it was through, um, an illness and for other people it's through oftentimes disordered eating and the, the head space that is devoted to food being sort of 90% of your brain sometimes. And then being afforded some of the privilege that that confers, right, the thin privilege and then losing that privilege through our bodies changing as bodies are want to do. Right.Amy: Yeah.Laura: And, and then it sounds as though there was this kind of, um, enduring desire to return to that, to maybe return to that privilege. And I just wondered if you could speak, speak to, to that and, and how, you know, a lot of people talk about grieving within ideal or, you know, just having to navigate letting go of what we're told that weAmy: I think it's so hard cuz it's also for me, it's bound up in, in ageing a little bit as well. So I'm 44 now and like the point at which I was thin was like maybe two years between like 17 and 19. And I think it's somehow how you tell yourself that that was the one true you and like how you are supposed to be, even though rationally, I know that it took so much, um, sort of powers of delusion and control for me to be that way. It was never gonna be the same again. It's not something that I know, you know, I know that it's not something that I could just practically maintain, even if I attained it temporarily, and part of me thought, oh God, I don't wanna go through that again.You know, this idea of, because people do, I was thinking about this the other day about, there was a point in my life where some people close to me got very thin and I watched them be praised more than, I'd seen them be praised for anything else in their life. And that really disturbed me because, yeah I found it really disturbing and I also thought, I know that that's bullshit, so I'm not prepared to. I'm not prepared to sort of give that power, because that's one thing I can control. I can say I am not gonna reward people for losing weight. Like, it, it's tricky cuz you want, you want to be supportive of people who want their bodies to be particular ways and, and, I dunno what I'm trying to say here, but. Everyone should be able to be in control of what goes on in their body basically. That's what I think. Um, but I think disengaging from diet talk and disengaging from saying to people things like, oh, you've lost weight, or That is flattering, or talking about myself in derogatory ways has been. It's like a practice that I just need to keep on with because I think if I lose that I could very easily fall into a kind of self-loathing trap again, and I would never be thin again. But I would feel a lot worse about myself. Like it wouldn't matter how many diets I did, I would never be that thin again. I might, you know, and so it, yeah, to me, it feels like, you know, like a black hole that would just take all of my energy and give very little back. Laura: Yeah, and I think you spoke there too, the idea of, of body autonomy, and that's such an important piece of this conversation. I think that, you know, I would never want any individual who was pursuing weight loss, intentional weight loss to feel shamed about that. But it also, we don't exist in, in a vacuum and you know, I think slightly delusional if we think that it's entirely under our own volition this desire to be thinAmy: Oh yeah,Laura: And we're swimming through diet culture, which of course, as we know, and you spoke to there as well, is the nexus of ableism, ageism, patriarchy. White supremacy. You know, it's, it's just kind of a an easily identifiable way of naming all of these ways that we are oppressed.Amy: No, I think it's so interesting cause I was reflecting on how I was talking to somebody about how they wanted to lose weight ahead of a special occasion and they said, oh, you know, I just wanna look nice in the photos. And if you are fat, it's quite hard to hear that and think, ah, Do I mess up photos because I haven't become thin?Uh, you know, and, and I'm somehow unacceptable photographically to the world. But if I were thin, then um, I would look nice and it would be recorded that I once in my life look nice as a thin person in a photograph. And when you start interrogating that more, I think you've go gods this is a load of nonsense that it, but it's so hard to unlearn because it's just everywhere. And I think, yeah, like you say, if you are, you know, I'm lucky because I'm cisgendered, I'm white woman. You know, I've got blonde hair and blue eyes, some, some western beauty ideals. But I am ageing and I am fat. And I am single and all of those things society does not accept or think, you know, they think you, well, you should sort yourself out because you are almost like wasting your body on the world if, if you are gonna allow yourself to be in this way. And that's the way it could feel sometimes.Laura: That's such an interesting idea that you just presented this sense of, of wasting your body.Amy: Yeah. Like, why be fat when you could be better looking? Like, it feels like that that's, that's the kind of choice that, that, um, people think you're making, like this choice to be less attractive. Like why are you being less attractive for me when you could be more attractive to me , if that makes makes senseLaura: Hmm mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I think it's just, it speaks to how fucked up our cultural values are or where we put our values as a society on aesthetics, on appearance, on this outward socially constructed idea of beauty or, yeah, which bodies, which people hold value and, and which don't. And it's, yeah, like when you start to kind of tug at that a little bit, it, it become, it unravels pretty quickly. I don't know how we can defend these ideas.Amy: I don't, I remember like having a conversation with a friend where I was talking about how when my, uh, one of my grandparents died, I was given a thousand pounds, like, which was the money that they'd left in their will, and I spent some of it on a laser hair removal machine, and I remember saying to my friend, , oh yeah you know, I can't cope with having both hairy legs and being fat and you know,Laura: Hmm.Amy: Together, like that's, that's even, that's even worse. Like I can only deal with the kind of emotional armour I have to put up with on one thing without there being another bit of my body that other, that people are gonna be objectionable to, which is kind of cowardly if me, in a way that I felt I needed to do that, but it was almost like, I can't deal with having more things that people will find undesirable about me.Laura: No, I've definitely heard and felt, you know, similarly that, you know, well, I guess it speaks to how we can only, there's only so much that we can deal with as individuals, even when we're kind of well versed in, you know, even when we hold deeply feminist values and we are, you know, committed to body liberation, but there's only so much that we can do on our own there's only so much armour that we can, can continue to, to put up. And so I think for a number of folks, when we come to fat positivity, fat liberation, there is this sense that, okay, I can be fat. And I have to be beautiful. And I have to be young, and I have to be, I have to perform health. I have to, um, you know, in some other way exonerate myself.Amy: Yeah, I've certainly heard a lot about that. You know, like people saying, you know, uh, I'll choose a salad when I'm eating, with some people who feel like inhibited by what other people might think is okay for them to, I mean, I will eat what I want and I'm lucky, I think because the people who surround me, you know, wouldn't be pay that any attention whatsoever.And it must feel so horrible to feel like you've gotta perform this idea of like the perfect fat person who exercising all the time and proving all the time that they eat healthily and all of this kind of stuff. But if you reject those notions of, of healthy ness as we are sold it in like a capitalist society, which is very different really from I think what we would like to embrace as an idea of health then I think we would all be a lot better off.Laura: Mm. But I think what I was kind of searching for before and, and struggling to find was, okay say we accept that bodies change and our body weight tends to track in or trend in one direction, right? And, I think, you know, holding onto these other, you know, whether it's about body hair or beauty or fashion or, um, you know, the fucking cosmetic industrial complex, like what it fundamentally boils down to is safety and keeping ourselves safe in a world that does not value our existence.Amy: Yeah. And that's really tough, isn't it? Particularly I think when you look at how health, healthcare seems to be orientating around, I mean, has for a long time, I guess, but orientating around like this idea that some people deserve to be treated and some don't. I've just realised it's tricky for me to talk about, cause I work in healthcare. Um, I feel like basically if fat phobia becomes, I mean, it's hugely prevalent anyway, but if it also becomes sort of state legislated as an unacceptable practice through laws and guidance and procedures and policies that are enacted through work, through healthcare education and so on. That's, it's just gonna make the lives of fat people so much worse. And it certainly won't make anyone thinner. Laura: Yeah.Amy: you know, if we as a country are serious about mental wellbeing, then we can't be going down that road.Laura: Yeah. I think what you're speaking to is this sort of neoliberal idea of personal responsibility and, and how we are all, You know, it's our duty as good citizens to control and restrict our bodies and to, you know, it's our job, it's our responsibility to stay thin for the good of the country and, you know, this is what is expected of us.Amy: Yeah, so that we are more productive and that we cost the state less and all of this, all of this business.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. something I was thinking about, well, I have, I guess, a confession to make that. When I first started reading your essay, when it got delivered to my inbox, I started reading it and I was really skeptical at first I was a little bit like, okay, where's this going? And then I'm gonna read this back to you. I read the line, “As a fat woman, I can feel inhibited talking about food because the gaze from which I imagine and know I'm perceived is one of greed as though I can't be trusted with my own appetites. Because of my fatness, I'm disallowed hunger. I refuse to be disallowed craving.” Sorry, I'm butchering your writing there. But that changed everything for me because, and I realised I was reflecting on it and I was like, up until that point, I assumed you were a thin person talking about your cravings.Amy: Oh, that's so interesting.Laura: And I think I'm doing this a disservice by assuming that they would've put some sort of like, I don't know. I'm not gonna like name tag anyone here, but you know, there was a very specific image that came to my mind of who you were until I read that line and I was so relieved because I felt like I could trust you. I felt like I could trust what you were saying.Amy: That's so interesting because I was really unsure about putting the fact that I'm fat in the piece. Um, for a couple of reasons. One, because. I'm still dealing with like the internalised shame of saying out loud to the people that I'm fat as though they haven't already noticed.It's almost like, you know, it's like, oh yeah of course other people are gonna see me as a fat person, but you know, sometimes in my head, that's not part of my self-image. I dunno what my self-image is, but, it's maybe my self-image isn't as embodied as it needs to be somehow. Um, so every time I say I'm fat, I'm like practicing becoming comfortable with that, owning it and, and using it as a term that is, is a neutral term. It's like a statement of fact. So like not in the space of, I know, and this is, you know, I'm supportive of this, but like trying to claim it as a word of pride. Just more in the space of this, this is a word we can use and it's okay. It's not gonna hurt me and I'm not gonna hurt myself by using it. So I wondered about that. And then I wondered also about writing about, you know, cravings and pleasure and colour and keeping things in this like very sort of sensory saturated, um, place, which is where the essay is predominantly. I wondered whether it had a place in there, but I realised that. It was so fundamental. The idea of having a fat body was so fundamental to almost like the, the cheekiness I felt in deciding to write about cravings and saying, I'm going to have fun writing about cravings. And I'm not going to be looking over my shoulder for people who think that I am wrong,Laura: yeah.Amy: So, um, it's really interesting that it's something that, it made the essay more persuasive for you. That's quite interesting for me to hear. Laura: It felt subversive. It felt like a fuck you, it felt like, I'm here and I'm owning this and you can't take this away from me. Um, and that, that really sealed, sealed the deal for me, and then I went back and reread it through that lens. And , I'm not trying to say like, you have to be fat to be trustworthy, or you have to be fat. Yeah, to take pleasure in food. But it just, it just shed a different light on it for me. So I was really, um, I think grateful to you for, for disclosing that because there was no picture of you. I didn't know what you looked like untilAmy: I mean, I feel like I totally get it because I, I often start out reading from a point of pure skepticism, particularly personal essays where, you know, say it's, um, somebody writing about, um, how I'm only 28 and I've just bought my first house. And then you get to the end and it's like, oh yeah, it's because you got 30 grand from your parents. And you got to live in granny's attic for two years. So this kind of disclosure is important for credibility of what people say. So I'm, I'm totally with you.Laura: Yeah. Well, there's something else that I wanted to ask you about. Sort of coming back to this essay. At the beginning you talked about food being exciting, being a place for creativity and connection, and I just wondered if you could. This is obviously what you explore in the essay and I'll link to it.It's a paywall piece, I believe, but it's like, if you don't have a subscription to this, what are you doing with your life? Honestly, But I just wondered if you could kind of Yeah. Try and sum up the feeling or feelings that you were connecting to and expressing through food. Subsequently through this essay.Amy: So I live alone. I think, I think I write about this in the essay a little bit. I live alone and I think when you live alone, you're often sort of encouraged. You are not encouraged, but there's a sort of sense that if you are just one person, food doesn't need to have a sense of occasion to. Like you, it's more functional and it's just me so I'll just get this, I'll just eat this ready meal or I don't bother. If it's just me, I'll just have beans on toast or, or whatever. I love, I love beansLaura: I was gonna say, that's a fine food. Don't knock me.Amy: food. And, and you know, I have a very elaborate beans on toast method of course that I cherish. I do want to challenge that and sort of work against it and think what is something that I can make for myself that really sort of vibrates with its meal just for one type intention and, you know, and things like that might be having a steak that is cooked just the way that I want it, that gets the flat all full of smoke and that I can eat with, um, you know, some oven chips and it feels very, very decadent. But I'm not impressing anyone. I'm just going for it on myself. And I think, giving yourself a, a, like a treat, a special treat, and paying attention to yourself as somebody who is deserving of, of pleasure, of decadence, of nourishment, um, even when nobody is looking or there's nobody to share it with.That that is something that's always behind how I think about food. And sometimes, you know, it, it might be like spending hours making a chicken stock and making sure that I've got some soup for myself during the week, or.Laura: Yeah.Amy: or standing over the sink eating a pear, uh, which is something that I write about in that essay and something that I did last night, I sliced it up and then there was just juice everywhere and I was just really enjoying this moment of being alone with my pear. But then there's also doing that for other people and the conversations that that might generate across a dinner table and how, for some reason, at a dinner table, I always feel at home and ready to get to know somebody better. That's really important for me and how I think about what food, the role food is playing in my life.Laura: I think there's something so interesting that I'd never really considered before about the narrative of what it means to, you know, the cooking for one. And yeah, how it's framed as being just really perfunctory and something that you have to do and, and that it's, there's no sense of occasion and the extension of that is that the only reason to kind of make, um, a song and dance about cooking, about preparing food, about sitting down to enjoy a meal is if you're doing it for someone else, but in, but very specifically in the context of a relationship, right? Like,Amy: Yeah, it's all bound in with like romantic love, I think. And it, I kind of write a little bit about this in, in my book. So I've got a book coming out in April called Arrangements in Blue, which explores living in the absence of romantic love.Laura: Hmm.Amy: And one of the things I kind of say in there is, you know, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that making a six pan five hour meal for one person is a radical act, but it kinda is cuz it's kind of saying, you are, you are, you are worth this effort.And if I didn't make any effort for the meals for which I prepare for myself, So many things would be off the menu for me. I'd be like living quite a grueling life. So, it's really important that I kind of push the boat out for myself basically.Laura: Yeah, yeah. No, I love, I love that idea a lot that, you know, in a, and I don't mean this in a like, Bubble bath self-care way, but in a, like, I am actually gonna invest in myself because I deserve the pleasure, the joy, the nourishment, um, the fulfillment that, that comes from not just the process and the act of cooking, but eating and enjoying this food as well.At the end of every episode, I ask my guests, Who or what is nourishing them? So what, what has been nourishing you in this season of, well, shit winter, January season, but also I am gearing up to, to publish a book and.Amy: Yeah, I feel very insecure. It's horrible. It's like I can't tell whether I'm waiting for something great to happen or waiting for something terrible to happen, but it's just this prolonged feeling of anticipation I'm not great with. So I think the, who's nourishing me, so my two cats, Minnie and Bam Bam, have been absolute stalwarts, always there for the scriptures and, you know, stupid faces. And. You know, just general demands on my attention, which is good distraction. My best pal Becky, who has been listening to me have every single neurotic thought that you can havepre publication and probably I should put a special mention in for my agent Ang who, um, has also had to deal with the kind of tremors of, uh, pre-publication. So they've, they've all been fantastic and I, I owe them a lot for their kindness and, and friendship.Laura: I'm glad that you have people caring for you during what is, I know a very, very anxious and yeah, I know that, that pre-publicationAmy: Yeah,Laura: Like black hole. It's a lot. Okay. And very, very last question is what are you snacking on at the moment? So, it can be anything from a literal snack that you are enjoying eating all the way through to something you're watching or reading or listening to. So what do you have for us?Amy: So, I finished reading a couple of weeks ago a book called Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan and is so amazing. It's a kind of novel made out of conversations that, uh, Kathryn had with a horse trainer called Sonya. It sounds like a strange premise for a book, but it's like a, a jolt to the brain.Laura: Ooh, I need one of those.Amy: Yeah, it's really, really fantastic. It's published by Don BooksLaura: Okay. I will link to that in the show notes. I'm very intrigued by that. Um, okay. My thing is definitely not as lofty. So, I, this is an Instagram account that has kind of blown up recently. Uh, you might have come across it. So the person is Lisa Timmons, and she, I think, Or they're a comedian.And, they basically they make these reels where they do a voiceover of celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow, like cooking in the kitchen, and then just like voiceover with like, I'm such a privileged fucking white lady and just that, it's just always so on point and like I was just watching one before we got on the call and it was basically, it was Gwyneth Paltrow chopping up some salad and like it probably had like, did not have enough calories to sustain a human being. And the voiceover was basically just like, you know, like, and uh, the idea here is to get as few calories as possible so that you have brittle fucking bones as you grow older.It's just like, yeah, that is what happens when you don't eat enough food. So that's my recommendation, Lisa Timmons Instagram. It's very funny if you, especially if you are navigating, unlearning and unsubscribing diet culture. I will link to that in the show notes. So you briefly mentioned you have a book coming out in April.You wanna tell us, um, how we can pre-order that and where people can find more of your work?Amy: So if you go onto the Penguin website, which I think is penguin.co uk, you can find my book Arrangements in Blue. It's published by Jonathan Cape and there were lots of pre-order links on there. And you can also follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Laura: We will make sure that the links are right there for anyone who wants to go and pre-order Amy's book. And I think you have some more of your writing on your website as well, which I'll link to. And your piece In Praise of Cravings, which we've talked a lot about. I'll link to that in the show notes.Amy, it was such a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here, and I can't wait to read your new book.Amy: Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me.OUTROLaura: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

*Content warning* - in this episode, we are talking about pregnancy loss and baby loss as well as experiences in the NICU and breastfeeding challenges. So if you’re not in the headspace for that right now then please take care of yourself and do whatever you need to to look after yourself.In this episode, journalist, author and fellow Substacker Jennie Agg is joining me on the pod. Jennie has just published her first book, ‘Life, Almost: Miscarriage Misconceptions and a Search for Answers from the Brink of Motherhood’ - an exceptional book which brings together her own experiences, along with expert interviews and reports on why we know so little about fertility and reproductive health. In our conversation, we focus on the erosion of trust that can happen in your body as a result of losing a pregnancy, and all the difficult emotions that can get stored in our bodies with nowhere to go to be held safely. We also talk a lot about body image and what has been healing for Jenny as she navigates a new relationship with her body post-partum. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Jennie’s work here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Order Jennie’s new book here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here’s the transcript in full:Jennie: And piece of that experience is it's, I remember, I mean, it's very difficult to not feel, I remember feeling very angry and very let down by my body. And it's very hard to, to reframe it. I think like I would, this is language that I used internally. It's not language I would use to somebody else or, you know, but you feel like your body has failed you. And I think it's very hard to reframe that as like you, it's very difficult to put a positive spin on that in any way, in the way that sometimes we're encouraged to you with things that are difficult, difficult experiences to do with our, our physical body. INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to another episode of the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter? Today I'm talking to author and fellow Subtacker Jennie Agg, who has just written an exceptional book called ‘Life, Almost’.It weaves together Jennie's own experience with miscarriage and pregnancy loss with expert interviews and impeccable reporting on why we know so very little about fertility and reproductive health. In our conversation today, we're really focused on the erosion of trust that can happen in your body as a result of losing a pregnancy and all the difficult emotions that can get stored in our bodies with nowhere to go to be held safely.And this is in part because of how isolating the experience can be and how the healthcare system is not at all set up to adequately support people who experience baby loss either in the moment or going forward into a new pregnancy after loss. We also talk a lot about body image and what has been healing for Jennie as she navigates a new relationship with her body postpartum.I think it's a really lovely conversation and a really important one, but it goes with the content warning that we are talking about pregnancy loss and baby loss as well experiences in the NICU and breastfeeding challenges. So if you're not in the head space for this right now, then please take care of yourself and do whatever you need to to look after yourself.I know we've had a few authors promoting their books back to back recently. I promise that not all the guests this season will be promoting books. I think maybe we have one more. We will also be hearing from some clinicians and researchers later in the season. Just the way that it worked out with books coming out it ended up that some of those authors are appearing earlier in the season. But I also really wanted to support Jennie because she's been a really supportive cheerleader for me and my work. Some of you might already know that Jennie helps edit some of my essays on the newsletter, and her input is really valuable, and it means that there aren't as many spelling or grammatical mistakes on the copy that Jennie has edited.So even if trying to conceive or miscarriage aren't on your radar at the moment, I think this is a really important book for anyone who cares about reproductive rights and why we know so little about the health of women and folks with a uterus. It's not just about having a baby, but it's also connected to our autonomy and our collective body liberation.So again, that's why I wanted to share Jennie's work. It's really, really important and I hope you will check out the book.We'll get to Jennie in just a minute, but first I wanted to remind you that my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop is on Tuesday, the 21st of February. It's pancake day. Don't worry.It's not going to be just me giving you a bunch of useless tips and tricks. You know, that's not what I'm about. But we will explore your relationship with food a little bit and think about how you can support your kids to have a positive relationship with food and their body. I will give you some practical tools. Um, we will talk about developmental milestones and things like that, but my intention is really to help. You take the pressure off of feeding your kids and help you create a home that supports a healthy relationship to food and bodies. I've linked to the full description in the show notes. So you can check it out. It's 15 pounds, it will be on Zoom, and I'll have the recording available for a week after. So if you can't watch it live, you can watch it on playback. Plus you'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eater's Guide to share it with family, friends, childcare, schools, whoever is responsible for feeding your kids.And the last thing before we get to the episode. Just a quick reminder that Can I Have Another Snack is a reader supported publication. I'd love to bring you more deeply research pieces, but it requires a significant investment in my time, plus the support of an editor, aka Jennie, and behind the scenes admin support, and a podcast editor as well.So if you are in a position to become a paid subscriber, then please consider it is five pounds or 50 pounds for the year, and if that's not accessible for you right now, you can email  [email protected] uk, putting the word snacks in the subject line, and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked. Please do not feel like you have to explain yourself or your situation. I trust that if you have the means to pay for a subscription and you value my work, then you will. And if you can't afford it right now, then um, maybe some point in the future you will be able to become a fully paid subscriber. But for now, just put snacks in the subject line and we'll hook you up with that comp subscription.All right, everyone. Here is my conversation with Jennie Agg.MAIN EPISODELaura: Jennie, can you start by telling us who or what you're nourishing right now?Jennie: Yeah, I can. So I'm Jennie. I'm a journalist and author, and I am nourishing myself, my husband, my two and a half year old Edward and three cats. And in nourishing, in the, the non-literal sense I am nourishing a writing career and specifically kind of branching out into writing books.Laura: I think you're being extremely modest right now, Jennie, I'm gonna be your, I'm gonna be your hype person for a sec.Jennie: Okay.Laura: So Jennie has a book as we're recording, Jennie's book is coming out in two weeks. Her first book. It's your first book, right?Jennie: Yeah, it's my first book. It's my first book.Laura: And. Yeah. By the time that everyone is listening to this, it will have just come out into the world. I wanna know how you, you know, where are we finding you? How are you feeling about it all? You've, you've been writing and putting your words out into the world for a long time. You've been writing very vulnerably for a long time, but does this feel different or are you just kind of like, oh, it's, it's more words going out into the world?Jennie: It definitely feels different. I mean, I never feel like cavalier or like comfortable with putting anything out, like even like sending out my newsletter, which I do every week. And before that, you know, I was writing a blog every week and I still, you know, pressing send still feels incredibly sort of panic inducing. But yeah, this does feel different. I mean it's a very personal book. And it feels, I guess it feels like the culmination as you said, I've been writing about pregnancy loss and my own experience with recurrent miscarriage and going on to have a baby. Like I've been writing about that for five years, six years now. Laura: I was thinking about this the other day, like way before you interviewed me for my first book, I'd come across your writing, maybe like in The Pool, RIP, or you know, some, something along those lines. And, and it was, it was one of the first pieces I'd ever read about miscarriage. And I remember being kind of like struck by it, obviously, because it's very personal and vulnerable, but also just thinking like, we don't, we don't talk about this.And so I remember, you know, even though babies weren't even on my radar at that point, thinking wow, what you're doing is really, really important work, and it feels like you've taken everything from the past, I dunno, five or six or however many years and you've put it into this new book.Jennie: Yeah. I mean that, and I guess that's what I've, I tried to do. I dunno if this is a really cliche thing to say but I, I wrote the book that I wanted to exist, like when I had my first miscarriage. And like, I wish I could say that the book answers all the questions that I had back then and that I still have now.And sometimes, like in kind of, delving into the, the science and interviewing various doctors and experts and historians about it, often the answer is we still don't know. And so the question is, why don't we know this? We need to do better really is the kind of thrust of the book really.And I think it's difficult for me to know exactly how far and how fast things have changed cuz I, you know, because I write about miscarriage and pregnancy loss and I am now kind of quite immersed in that world and community, it's difficult for me to know exactly how much things have actually changed.So when I had my first miscarriage in 2017 I just didn't, I didn't know anything about it. I really didn't think it was a thing that was going to happen to me. And oh, I should preface this by saying like, my background, I'm a health journalist, so there were lots of things that hadn't happened to me that I knew a little bit about.And okay, you never know exactly what something is like if you haven't been through it. But I really had no idea and I was really shocked when they'd kind of say, oh actually this is really common. And they sort of give you all these leaflets and they quote statistics at you and you're like, but hang on, they didn't tell me this when I went to my booking in appointment with the GP. It's not, you know, I've been reading the NHS website advice saying at eight, nine weeks, or, you know, look into what maternity leave you're entitled to start thinking about, I don't know, when you want to start your leave and you are kind of given things on your next scan and the 20 week scan, like right from the word go. And there's very much this presumption that your pregnancy will continue.Laura: And it's a kind of a linear, straightforward process. And you go from A to B to C.Jennie: Yeah, exactly. And I think miscarriage is kind of there in that it's, you are told don't eat this because there's a, you know, soft cheese and listeria and risk of miscarriage and, you know, there are lot, lots and lots of things that you are told to do or not to do.And perhaps miscarriage risk is mentioned, but it, rightly or wrongly, I think I felt going into that first pregnancy that miscarriage was something they kind of understood. They knew why it happened, and if you followed the rules would be okay. And I, you know, I did follow the rules. Then this, it kind of everything was sort of turned on its head really in that they go, oh, it's just one of those things. It happens sometimes. It happens quite a lot actually. And that was, it just kind of blew everything open for me, really. So I wrote about it for the newspaper where I worked at the time. And then as kind of things unfolded I went on to have two more miscarriages that same year, some medical tests which were inconclusive, and then I had another miscarriage after that. I mean, that's a very, that's a very condensed version. But I wrote about it. I wrote about it in the magazines and newspapers, and then also I, I started blog and yeah. And then I had a kind of period of time off from trying to conceive because it becomes very all consuming particularly when there, perhaps we'll come back to this, but when there were kind of no answers of what, why something has happened or whether it will happen again, or, you, it, it kind of takes over your life because you are, you are sort of looking for lots of things you can do yourself, whether that's your diet or your exercise or life, just sort of lifestyle things.Is it stress? Is it my job? Is it, you know, all those things. The answer to all of those is probably no but it, you kind of feel like it might be, it must be worth trying. Like, you know, you, you feel like you need to try absolutely everything. And actually that becomes quite a difficult way to live.So we kind of took quite a long period out from trying to conceive and when we did feel ready again I got pregnant for a fifth time in 2019. And this again, is a very condensed , a very condensed version. But I did, I did go on to have my son. Yeah. There was a question that, I dunno whether I've answer answered or not.Laura: Well I think I was just reflecting on sort of the, you know, how I first came across your work and, and just, it, it just felt so, I don't want this to sound like really belittling, but it felt really, really brave and courageous to put that out into the world. And, you know, I think I had read your account of your first miscarriage, and this kind of like realisation that, okay, well first of all, I didn't expect this to me, no expect this to happen to me, nobody prepared me for this to be even a possibility. And secondly, the, the recognition that we don't know what, you know, we, we know very little about why this happens to you. And then it sounds as though from there, when you had recurrent miscarriage, you know, you did the, I know that the NHS has this sort of like, what seems to me to be, what's the word that I'm looking for you? The, the rule notJennie: Oh, like it's com-, It's very arbitrary.Laura: the arbitrary, yes.Jennie: Yeah. It's a very arbitrary rule. And basically they will only if it's first trimester miscarriages, they'll only investigate for possible kind of other medical causes after three miscarriages which, like there are reasons for it, which I, which I understand. Although there have been, there have been calls recently, to adopt a slightly more kind of grade, I think it's called a kind of the graded, graded model of care. And so there would be some follow up after one miscarriage, some sort of preliminary tests after two, and then kind of what they do now after three.And like within all of that, the, the recommendation is that there would be kind of some sort of psychological support if people need it, which, and so far kind of the government has not, has not taken up this recommendation from lots of scientists and campaigning groups. Not a surprise. And I, and it's really tricky to talk about this at the moment and to kind of talk about how inadequate the provision is and the kind of support is for people going through miscarriage because, you know, health service is so stretched, so that's not a, you know, that's not a criticism of people working in hospitals or early pregnancy units or gps. It's a, you know, this is a moreLaura: systemicJennie: systemic like criticism. Yeah, I mean, there's so much we could talk about, like, I think, I can't remember the exact figure, but I tried to find out in the book how many early pregnancy units open seven days a week. Like open all hours basically. And I can't remember there, there aren't really any, there might be, it's single, like it's single figures.Laura: MmJennie: Like two or four or something that I could find in the whole of the UK, and so, some are only open like two hours Monday to Friday and it's like yeah.Laura: And I just like, this is the, the sort of feeling that I'm left with is that once something, you know, when you experience a miscarriage, or even if you're just unsure in those early weeks and months, if everything is okay, it's such a lonely, isolating experience because there's nowhere to go. And when we have, you know, when these institutions that are supposed to support us, care for us, look after us, you know, are, when they, when they're literally only open two hours a day, what message does that send about, you know, how much our experiences are valued. And I think that that kind of like, you know, the fact that we don't get any kind of investigation or even really support at all until there have been three recurrent first trimester miscarriages just goes to show again that, you know, that, that, that, that experience, like we're, we're sort of left to deal with it on our own.Jennie: Yeah. And ILaura: No one to help us kind of like yeah. Move through that.Jennie: No, it really invalidates it, I think, and it sort of sets up this hierarchy in that you're like, you are, you'd kind of, well, certainly how I felt was that, I really believed I was, that first time I really believed I was going to have a baby, and, you know, all those kind of things you think about and things you imagine and plan for that was all very real and was happening and was underway. And I was, you know, I'd been pregnant for nearly the first miscarriage happened just before the 12-week scan.So, you know, I'd been pregnant forLaura: Yeah.Jennie: a few months, but at that point like, I knew about it with all that that entails. And then suddenly it was not happening. And the reaction was kind of completely the opposite to how I was feeling in that the reaction was, this happens all the time. And then you are, you are kind of told that they're not gonna. they're not gonna ask you. They, I mean, I was really shocked that they didn't even ask me any questions. Kind of like, what had you been doing when it started? Or like, and that's, you know, that has its own problems in that then that you start to think it must be something I did. And in a way, that's why they don't ask those questions,Laura: Yeah. Yeah.Jennie: but at the same time, you, the lack of interest or curiosity in why this happened to you when on paper there shouldn't have been any issue is really disorienting.And also then it, like you don't know how to frame your experience. So I was like, oh, right. So should I just be, should I just be okay? Should I be bouncing back from this quicker than I am? And I was, you know, it, it was, certainly that first time was very physically traumatic. And thenLaura: Yeah.Jennie: also it felt, it felt like a full on bereavement, really. So I would've struggled to say that in my real life at the time. Like, I would've felt that I shouldn't claim that, that that would, you know, and I think part of that comes from the fact that they don't, they don't and can't investigate until you've had more miscarriages. It's like, well then that's when it's, like quote unquote a proper issue. That's when you are allowed to feel all these complex feelings. And that's when, you know, you can lay claim to grief or a sort of Yeah. Any of those things. And I, it took, it really me, like, I guess what I'm saying is it really messed me up psychologically. And it makes, it kind of encourages you, I think, to push down what you are actually feeling and to kind of minimise your own grief and anger and shock and, and it's completely, it's completely the opposite of what actually now they're starting to learn through scientific studies about how people feel and how that experience affects people.You know, it's a significant proportion. I think it's about one in five people who have an early pregnancy loss. So that might be a first trimester miscarriage it might be ectopic pregnancy, experienced symptoms like PTSD. And it's, it's, and partners as well. Like it's not quite as, as high of proportion. It's like 1 in 12, I think a kind of secondary study to that study found, which is, is shocking. Like this is this huge, that's such a massive finding.Laura: And it sounds as though you know that, that that study was measuring people who met some sort of like clinical threshold for PTSD or PTSD,Jennie: yeah, yeah,Laura: And what about everybody else who is experiencing these really complex, really painful emotions and they just have to go to work the next day?Jennie: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, and they, I think from memory, that study does, does talk as well about how within that there are a lot of people who might not have met that clinical criteria for PTSD but there was, you know, anxiety and depression were really common. Which again, and you are just expected to pick up and, and start again and, you know, try to get pregnant again, which is a whole other. And this is really, I think a large part of my book and what I write in the book is my experience of pregnancy after loss and after miscarriages and how that is actually, it's a completely different experience. Pregnancy without that knowledge. And I, I still don't know that that's something we're really that familiar with. Like outside of very particular support communities.Laura: Yeah. How do you, I mean, there's so many things that my, my brain is going to here but there's, you know, sort of this question of, well, how do you sort of raise awareness of the fact that miscarriage can be a possibility without then creating a lot of fear and anxiety in people trying to conceive? And then also this, this big question of how do you support people through a pregnancy when either they've had, you know, pregnancy complications previously, or experienced baby loss or miscarriage or, you know, god forbid, like the loss of a, a young child, you know, what kind of support needs to be put into place?And, it sounds like. A, it's taking, it's taking science a really long time to catch up with the fact that people might have really difficult feelings and, and feel really ambivalent about, about going into a, another pregnancy. And yeah, the, even, even once we've kind of like identified that that's the case, what then is the support?Jennie: Yeah. What do we actually do about this? Yeah.Laura: Yeah. And the thing that I'm, I'm really curious to talk to you about, because it's kind of a thread that runs through this podcast and the newsletter, which is around, you know, when you experience something like this where you know your body doesn't sort of, it doesn't act in the way that we expect it to and want it to.And, and maybe, you know, we, we feel let down or betrayed by our bodies. And, and I can sort of speak from experience here in terms of like birth not going to, to plan and you know, early experiences with, with feeding that there's, there's a lot of, of grief and you know, that can be a very painful experience.And I'm just, I'm curious to know what, what your experiences were around body trust and maybe body image more broadly. You know, having gone through these recurrent miscarriages.Jennie: It's a really. What's the right word? It's a huge factor, I think. And piece of that experience is, I mean, it's very difficult to not feel, I remember feeling very angry and very let down by my body. And it's very hard to reframe it. I think like I would, this is language that I used internally. It's not language I would use to somebody else or, you know, but you feel like your body has failed you. And I think it's very hard to reframe that as like you, it's very difficult to put a positive spin on that in any way, in the way that sometimes we're encouraged to you with things that are difficult, difficult experiences to do with our physical body. So, you know, and it's, it's hard I think in the, you know, my body, I didn't look pregnant to the outside world, which, you know, for some people that will be their experience of, of pregnancy loss. You know, they will have announced their pregnancy and been visibly pregnant. And then that is, it's a whole other element of this.But for me, other people might not have seen it, but, you know, my body had, had changed and I was, and I think, I mean, maybe it's because it's, you are hyper aware, I think, in pregnancy particularly, or I certainly was in that first trimester with my first pregnancy. I mean, and then certainly in later pregnancies, you are hyper aware of every symptom or twinge that you have or kind of, and, and you feel different anyway, right?Like, you don't feel very well, you feel very tired. There's a lot going on. Like as in, it's a very, it's a very physical experience that first trimester, even though we kind of still have this convention of like not announcing a pregnancy then, so you kind of do all that in private,Laura: Mm-hmm.Jennie: andLaura: And then you emerge in the second trimester as this glowingJennie: Yeah, yeah. Like,Laura: The fantasy that we're sold, isn'tJennie: And it, it's very difficult, I think, and it, you've, what do I mean? I think I felt so resentful. I felt so resentful of, you know, what I perceived as kind of weight gain and changes to my body, which, you know, like I look back now and I think that was, my brain had definitely exaggerated the reality of that. And I think that's, that's complicated, isn't it? It's that sort of idea of like, oh, I, I feel, I feel fat today. It's like, what does that, what does that really mean? Particularly, you know, talking as somebody who is straight sized.Laura: It feels very familiar, I think what you're talking about. You know, that we, we often put all the difficult, raw emotions that we're experiencing, the grief, the trauma, the stress, the anxiety, all of it onto. , you know, we, we distill that because, because it feels really hard to say all of those things, the, the, you know, the resentment as well, which is such a great word.I think we, we reduce it down to a feeling of being fat when, you know, like you said, that's not, that's not a feeling. And our bodies are, are holding all of these complex feelings and emotions that that we sometimes find hard to, especially if, you know, we haven't announced our pregnancies to the world, or especially if we don't have a space to go to, like a therapist or, you know, someone to hold and contain that for us, we, we kinda store it in our bodies and it, and it shows up in these really unwelcome ways.I dunno if that speaks toJennie: Yeah, it, it, it really does. I think, cuz there, something I remember from certainly that first time and then also after subsequent pregnancy losses, the fear of being mistaken for pregnant was huge and if you think about it in a purely rational, like, logical way that it would make sense if somebody thought I, like, I had, you know, in some cases I had literally been pregnant two days previously. Like that was not, and yet somehow that was all really bound up with a sense of kind of, loss of control and kind of moral failing and, and it, you know, it, it, it's almost certainly informed by all the things we're told about postpartum bodies and how women should, you know, you're celebrated for looking pregnant up until the moment you give birth. And then you should, your body should like bear no trace of having carried and birthed a baby, like, you know, in that incredibly unrealistic way. So I'm, you know, there's, that's almost certainly a part of it, but it's that idea of somehow I would feel ashamed to be mistaken for pregnant when I mean, and obviously like that it's just, there's the pure, like that's a painful thing because it's having to admit or reflect on the fact that I wasn't pregnant and I really wanted to be. But at the same time that sort of focus on your body and how you look and particularly like how your stomach looks is it's hard for me. Like, to me it's hard not to see that in the context of all the various narratives around women's bodies and body size and yeah snapback culture, whatever it is. So yeah, that definitely, I can see, I can see that that's probably what was going on there.Laura: Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to directly compare experiences because I know that losing a baby is, is absolutely not the same as the experience that I have. Yet there are, there are some things that feel very relatable to in what you're saying and I'm thinking about a time when Avery was in the NICU and we were getting a taxi up to the hospital and I still looked very, very pregnant cuz I had just given birth and the, there was an assumption by the taxi driver that I was in labor going to the hospital to give birth or that, you know, that I was very close to my due date. And, you know, there was this big smiley face and this reception of like, oh, and, and, and, and it was the same when, when I, you know, when when I give birth, there were all these congratulations being thrown at me. And I was like, but my baby is, look at him like he's really ill. And I'm gonna get, I'm getting really emotional. Sorry Jennie, butJennie: no. It's okay.Laura: I just, there was just this visceral rejection of that congratulations. And at that time I can see it differently now, but at that time it, I was chalk up to the failure of my body, you know, the failure to, you know to have the birth and the labor that I wanted to have and sort of, you know, was blaming myself for effectively putting him in the NICU which is, you know, I've done a birth debrief, that's not the case.Right. like, I can rationally say that now, but you know, there was, there's something there that I think you're speaking to with, you know, the changes in your body and how your body looks and how something is perceived maybe to be this really positive thing like a pregnancy, like giving birth, but that actually something else is concealed behind that something very, very different. And your reality not matching up to what's maybe presenting outwardly, if that makes sense.Jennie: Yes. Yeah, it does make sense. It does make sense. I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. And then for me, I think the kind of, and this has been a sort of then been a thread that's gone through kind of all of my subsequent pregnancies. And then going on to have my son and to be a parent, and those kind of early experiences of parenting is that real fear of kind of something unknown that's wrong with your body because, that's kind of what that experience leads you to because there was never any, and this is the case for, I think it's about 50% of people who have recurrent miscarriages, as in, so people who have medical tests for multiple miscarriages, most, at least half, never, like, there's never any kind of specific diagnosis. And I think, I talk about this in the book, recurrent miscarriage is kind of thrown around as a label, as if it's a diagnosis, but it's not.Laura: And as if it's like a homogenous experience,Jennie: And like actually it's not like there'll be lots of different, potentially lots of different reasons. And most of the time, probably a lot of those reasons we don't know what they are yet. And most of the time you, you won't be given any kind of anything concrete that they're say, well, you know that this blood marker or whatever it is. Absolutely every test I had and there were many, lots of blood tests and then sort of scans of like my pelvic anatomy and the shape of my womb, that sort of thing all came back completely normal.There's nothing in my kind of menstrual cycle history or anything like that would, that would point to anything hormonal or yeah, and I think, so then there's I think quite logical fear of like, but clearly this isn't, clearly this shouldn't be happening.Laura: Mm-hmm.Jennie: Like this is too many in a row. It's too like the, the explanation, which is really what you are, you are sort of encouraged to think, which is that this is just bad luck.Like that doesn't feel very satisfactory. And I mean, it might be true, but I also think we're a little bit over-reliant on that idea that it, that it might, that it, it is true. And so that, that leads you to, there's something in my body that, or in the way that my body works that we don't really understand yet, that they, you know, don't know how to fix was where my brain went.And that that's very difficult to put aside. Even, and so, I mean something coming back to kind of how that's carried through. So when Edward was born and I was trying to feed him and kind of those early days of breastfeeding, which were difficult, not, I don't think in the grand scheme of things, I don't think we had that difficult a time.You know, he wasn't, very glad to say he wasn't in the NICU or anything like that. So we were able to try it right from the beginning. And I know that's not true for everybody. But you know, it's a hard thing. It's a hard thing to doLaura: Yeah. Regardless of, you know, how your baby came into the world, it's, it's hard.Jennie: Like even in the best of circumstances, like I think it's a hard thing to do and it's a new skill to learn all those things.So he, and kind of in spite of feeling like we'd sort of got the hang of it and it was kind of working, like his weight dropped at those kind of first checks that they do with the midwife when he was home. And then so they sort of go through all their things and they say, right, well let me watch you feed him.And they kind of do their observations and they looked at him and they kind of, and again, this is, this is something I write about a little bit in the book, but they said, It's like several midwives and then a feeding consultant said, well, it doesn't, it all seems fine. You're doing everything right. There doesn't seem to be a reason. You know, like positive things that should be like in other circumstances will be very good news. But you're like, but you are telling me his weight is dropping too much. And that really like hit some kind of internal alarm bell for me because it was just that I possibly didn't even realize I had, which was like, there is something wrong with me that can't be fixed.Or there's something wrong with him and you, like we don't know enough to know what it is. And kind of knowing that like being told there's nothing wrong isn't always very comforting news. Like that kind of prior knowledge of that. Made that in an incredibly stressful time. I mean, the, the, like, the punchline to this is the feeding consultant who was very kind and gave me lots of helpful like practical advice said, did you take a picture of the scales at the hospital? And I was like, no, of course I didn't. I was, I was being stitched up. She was like, they, cuz they write, I dunno if this is true for every hospital, but our hospital wrote down the weight in grams, so it's like a, it's that right grams. So it's like a four, it's like a four digit numberLaura: yeah.Jennie: Said sometimes they just, they might have just switched likeLaura: Like a two and a three or,Jennie: Yeah, exactly.And so actually what would've been like a, you know, a couple of percentage drop in weight was actually like 13% or whatever. And like he, you know, there were never any other outward signs that he was struggling. Like,Laura: Yeah.Jennie: So, like, I can kind of laugh about it now, but at the time it really felt, it was a real reminder that, that that runs really deep now that fear of kind of, it's fear of basically it's fear of the unknown, isn't it? But it's, it's so kind of rooted in my body and kind of by extension now Edward's body. Does that make sense?Laura: It makes so much sense and,I mean, I could and maybe one day I will write an entire book about feeding babies in theJennie: oh, I would buyLaura: early daysJennie: that book, Laura. I would buy thatLaura: And kind of like the things we say particularly around, you know, weight loss in those early days and, weight regain and feeding and, ugh, there's so much that happens in that short period of time that can, that can create anxiety and fear that carries through that, you know, that sets the tone for that feeding relationship.Like when I'm working with parents and, you know, there's someone ha-, you know, their child has some challenges around feeding, like I can, you can trace that line back to some horrific thing that uh, you know, a flippant comment that a healthcare professional has said to them about, you know, not gaining enough weight or eating too much is the other, you know, like you can never just get the, the, the perfect balance.Right? Right. And, and, and so the genesis of a lot of parents fears and concerns, like it, it comes back to that point. And I think, you know what a health visitor maybe isn't so cognizant of, is all of your backstory and the, the, you know, all of the challenges and, and the, the pain and the grief and everything that you're carrying into that experience with your child.So they're giving you this, you know, what they think is just a factual thing, which turns out, in your case it wasn't even factual, butJennie: No. No. And he was, and he was fine. Like,Laura: And that's the thing, they don't look at the baby. They don't ever look at the baby. They look at the chart. I mean, I'm doing a disservice to midwives and health. Not all health visitors and midwives, but you look at a number and you don't look at the broader context. Like, oh, you know, how are they feeding?Do they look like, you know, do they have like chubby arms and legs and, you know, what are their parents' statures and body sizes? And like, how does that factor into this? So like, yeah, there's, there's, yeah, I, I could go on and on and on about that, but I think yeah, like not taking into context the broader, you know, like fears and anxieties and pressures and, and feelings.The, the conflicting feelings that you have you know, as a result of, of how, you know, in your case how Edward came into the world and how you feel about your own body. I, I don't know, it just feels like there needs to be a shift in how we are yeah. Like how we are caring for, for people in the whole entire perinatal period.Jennie: Yeah, I mean, definitelyLaura: I think, I mean, yeah, that goes without saying right? But, I feel like I kind of lost the thread and just got up on my soapbox a little bit there. And I'm, I'm curious to know, there are so many other things, Jennie that we, we kind of like said that we would talk about that we're not gonna have time for, but I think what feels important to, to maybe think about is, you know, you've talked about feeling let down by your body and, and the sort of broken trust. You know, I think we, we all kind of go into pregnancy by and large, or going go into trying to conceive with like just this implicit trust that our bodies are gonna do the things that we would like them to do in the way that we would like them to, to do them.And then, you know, what you're talking about is just this bit by bit by bit erosion of that trust, you know, first through recurrent miscarriage, which, you know, in and of itself that's multiple layers of, of erosion of trust and then into, into breastfeeding. And, you know, I'm sure there are other elements of parenting and just being a body in the world.But I'm curious, you know, how, or if, or you know, what regaining trust in your body looks like, feels like, if it even feels possible. Yeah, I'm, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. In the, in the like five minutes we've got, got left.Jennie: Ooh. Yeah. Okay. I have a really pithy easy answer to this. No, I don't. But I do think it is possible. So there are a few things. So I think at least initially there was kind of the, I had the opposite feeling that I'd felt after my miscarriages and being very worried about being mistaken for pregnancy. So kind of getting, first of all, in pregnancy, getting further along.And I, like, I had a very anxious, very difficult pregnancy in lots of ways, like, and I. It was a very difficult time psychologically. But at the same time, there were definitely kind of quite healing, I think is probably the right word, things in, in that sort of physical evidence of pregnancy and kind of seeing my body change and feeling a baby move and going to term. That was really, that was very healing.It might not always have felt like that at the time, but like now I kind of look back and I think I can see that it, it was, and I like, I liked that, like, I liked kind of seeing myself pregnant and I liked kind of when I felt sort of ready, which was quite far on into pregnancy. Like I really liked buying maternity clothes and you know, things that, and even like if the maternity clothes were a bit crap, like , like, I kind of like, that was quite nice in itself.It's like, oh I would not choose this dress in real life. But you know,Laura: It fits. It fits over.Jennie: It fits, it fits and it's comfortable and like it's not too hot or whatever it was. And kind of recognising those feelings that you kind of, I would used to hear other pregnant women complain about and think, I'm so jealous of you.Like, getting to experience those things myself was really kind of, I dunno if that sounds perverse, but that was very healing. I was lucky in that I had a relatively positive birth experience. Like I had an induction, which I know is notLaura: Oh, no, that's not a positive birth experience, Jennie. That's the-Jennie: And like again, I mean God I wish I probably shouldn't have even mentioned it, should I, cuz that'sLaura: It's a whole thing. Yeah.Jennie: like, I mean, and it's literally a chapter in the book.Laura: God, it's so,Jennie: But actually I had a really positive birth experience like in the, possibly in the sense that it exceeded my expectations and that was, you know, that was good. I'm, so, I'm very aware that I'm kind of saying that to somebody who had the opposite experience and I hope that's not,Laura: Oh, no, no, no. I'm honestly, I'm so pleased when people say like, actually it didn't all go tits up and feel okay aboutJennie: Yeah. And, so that was, you know, that was and then, oh, this is what I was going to say. So the other thing was I had, after Edward was born and I was still like visibly very, like I looked what we would consider to be a pregnant body, but really it's just a, like, I had a baby two weeks ago, three months ago body like I, I didn't have that same like, oh God, I hope no one mistakes me from pregnant. Because I was like, I was there, I had Edward with me most of the time, like, and we weren't really going out that much anyway because of lockdown and things. But so that was really nice being like, well, yeah, I looked like I just had a baby cuz I just had a baby.And that was a kind of, that was a nice like it was a kind of, felt like a correction perhaps. It gets more complicated, that relationship with my body as time went on in a sort of more superficial sense and like a, I guess a body image for want of a better phrase sense. You know, like when my body still look different at nine months, like I have a particular loathing for those nineLaura: Yeah.Jennie: nine months out pictures like I.Laura: Well, you knowJennie: I know I know, I know, for some people, I know for some people that's just like fun. And not everybody who shares those pictures is a fitness influencer or whatever, but I, yeah, I dunno. They, I can't, they, they do something to me. And I think, what else do I think? So I think now that I'm kind of two years, two and a half years on from having a baby I think the thing that's been this is, it's perhaps quite a low key thing to say, like helps rebuild that trust. But it's just that it's a little bit of I've had a period of like stability, I guess, in my body. Like I'm not breastfeeding anymore. I haven't been for, for a long time. I'm not actively trying to conceive, I've not, you know, I've not had a miscarriage since Edward was born.Like that just period of letting my body just be and for it not to be not,Laura: I guess there are no expectationsJennie: Yeah, no, expectations is a really, yeah, I was gonna say like, no, like nasty surprises, but yeah, no expectations of it to be doing anything other than like, I don't know, letting me sit at my desk and work and, you know, theLaura: being, yeah.Jennie: plodding run at park run or, you know, whatever. Just like be, exactly just being. And it feels a little bit like, so we had a period of about a year off from trying to conceive. That was a quite a healing time and I'd really resisted it for such a long time. I'd really resisted it because I felt we just needed to kind of get through and, you know, try again and try again.But actually that time to just not be worrying about what I was eating or drinking or, you know, all those things was really it, I was quite skeptical that it, that I would make me feel better like that just, just doing nothing would make me feel better. And actually it did, and it's been the same postpartum as well, like,Laura: Mm.Jennie: But that's not always what you want to hear when you are in the kind of the middle of those, like ruptures in how you relate to your body, which like, that's difficult.Laura: And, and it's interesting that you used the word rupture there because it's, it's what was going through my head as well, that, you know, the these perturbations in our body you know, whether it's because of, you know, trying to conceive or the, the, whether it, you know, it's miscarriage, pregnancy itself, giving birth, breastfeeding, all of these, you know, just yeah perturbations in our body, you know, they can be, not miscarriage obviously, but, you know, pregnancy, breastfeeding can be really positive connecting experiences for our body and they can also really disconnect us and, and, and, and make our bodies feel not not quite as safe. Yeah. We, we've, we've maybe feel more disconnected in those periods and, and also it can be both at the same time.And and I think, yeah, I'm thinking about this from the perspective of, of being embodied, of being in our bodies, of, of not being separate from our bodies that, you know, these milestones, these landmarks, I suppose can, can both take us in and out of our bodies. And usually, and, and I think that's why it's such a head fuck, right?Because,Jennie: yeah, yeah.Laura: You go, you're going back and forth. You're like, do I wanna be in my body? Do I wanna be out? It,Jennie: yeah. Yeah. And like on a almost like hourly basis sometimes, likeLaura: And, and then, and then it sounds like what you're, what you're sort of, where you're at at the moment is like, just letting my body be, or letting your body be has, has helped you kind of come back to it in a sense.And I, and I know it's not, that's a, a nice simple narrative, but, and it's not quite that simple, but, but that there has been some healing, some catharsis, some yeah, reconnecting that, that has taken place for you in just yeah, letting your body be.Jennie: Yeah, definitely, definitely.Laura: Well, Jennie, that feels like a really nice note to wrap this up on. So before we go, I would like to ask you who or what is nourishing you right now?Jennie: So the obvious one is my husband Dan. He, yeah, he just makes sure, particularly at the moment when work stuff and kind of book publicity stuff has been quite overwhelming. Like he's made sure that I'm not staying up until midnight at my computer, and yeah, that I stop and eat my dinner and just basic, boring, basic things like that.But also something I was thinking about, in terms of like bringing this book out into the world is the thing that that's kind of sustained me, I guess, is all the kind of little ways that people have been supportive of it. So whether that's like you inviting me on this podcast or kind of newspaper editors I've worked for before being like, oh, will you write a piece about your book?Or like, so this is, this just happened at the weekend. I gave a copy of the book to one of my very close friends, and he has very deliberately put it on his bookshelf behind like, so he does a lot of meetings from home. He's like, I'm gonna put it on my bookshelf so everyone will see it. And I was like, that's the sweetest thing.Laura: Cute.Jennie: Yeah, exactly. So yeah. And just little things like that are really, really nice. And I've had a couple of messages from people being like I've, I've just found your blog, or I just found your Instagram and I've pre-ordered your book. And yeah, it's just nice. It's not like, it doesn't, it's something about all of those things together is very, like it's a, it's a very vulnerable book.I think I need to kind of accept that that's the case. And I think this has been a nice, like, balancing counterbalance with that is that actually lots of people have been very supportive and yeah, that's nourishing, I think in biggest sense.Laura: Yeah. Oh, I love that. I, I know certainly you and I have talked about vulnerability hangovers before.Jennie: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, they're real. And I, I guess, yeah, I don't know. The one from this book might be horrendous. It's gonna be like a, I dunno, difficult to know how it'll feel, we'll see.Laura: But having those kind of reminders that actually, although it's difficult, it, though it's incredibly difficult subject matter, that this will be really healing and cathartic and supportive for a lot of people who have been through something similar. And it sounds like that's the, the sort of little bits of recognition that you're getting and, and yeah, just the.Jennie: I think that's it. It's those like little moments of, we support this. Like we want, we think this message needs to be out there. Like, we've got you. Like that's really nice. It's just a really nice, it's a nice thing.Laura: Yeah. For anyone who's listening who has found this episode useful or any of Jennie's work useful, please drop us a comment to show a little bit of appreciation for Jennie. Alright. Before I let you go, I need to know what you are snacking on right now, so it can be a literal snack, like my one is this week. Or a podcast, a book, a show. Just something that you're really into at the moment and that you wanna share with the audience. So what are you snacking on right now, Jennie?Jennie: Oh, okay. So I really wanted to have like a good literal snack and I've kind of failed completely, but like, I don't want this to be like one of those like food diaries that go viral and it's like my treat is an almond milk cappuccino. Like that's not what this is intended to be. But for various reasons, I had some leftover chocolate oat milk in my fridge and I was like, I don't know what to do with this. Like the thing I was gonna use it for, I ended up not making. And then the other day I'd run out of other milk of any kind. I was like, I know, I'll put it in my coffee. And it's,Laura: Ooh.Jennie: It's great.Laura: Can I be clear? Are we talking about chocolate Oatly?Jennie: Yes. Do you know if that's controversial?Laura: No, no, no, no, no, no. I was just about to say, I use that to make ice lolls for Avery, blend it up with a bit of banana, a peanut butter,Jennie: That's a very good idea.Laura: Really delicious. So if you ever have, you know, like dregs in the carton and like you are not sure what to do with it, they make good ice lollies too.Jennie: That is a genius, so yeah, I've been having a lot like my kind of accidental homemade mocha. Yeah, so that's good. That's been a good, like, it's not really a snack, is it? It's a drink.Laura: Yes. Let's be clear that is, that is not a meal replacement option. NoJennie: No, no, no. But it is delicious and it has been cheering me up actually as I've been working. It's like so yeah, that's good. And I will have to try and make some ice lollies with it.Laura: That sounds delicious. Mine, mine is also a food related thing. So I, this week I made some vegan millionaire shortbread. Do you know, like Carnation condensed milk?Jennie: Yes.Laura: Okay. So like super retro.Jennie: Yeah. But it makes,Laura: yeah, they've got a vegan version now and they have a recipe on their website for like vegan millionaire shortbread. Like, it's not, it's not a new recipe or anything like that. In fact, my friend Izy Hossack, the cookbook author and food stylist you might have heard of her, she like styled one of their recipes for her Instagram like, ages and ages ago. And that's how I found out about it. And I've been making it like periodically ever since.And then Dave got a bee in his bonnet about having it the other day, like on a Monday night. So I had to like, try, like after I did the childminder pickup, like went to go and get all the ingredients from the shop and yeah, made the whole thing and it was I mean they helped as well, but it was delicious. And we have been enjoying Millionaire Shortbread so I’ll link to the recipe in the shownotes.Jennie: Oh yeah, that sounds good.Laura: Jennie, before you go, could you please let everyone know where they can find you and your work, and more importantly, where they can get hold of your book.Jennie: Yes, absolutely I am. I am on social media, mostly on Instagram. I am there as @JennieMonologues, and it's Jennie with an ie. And my book Life Almost: Miscarriage Misconceptions and a Search for Answers from the Brink of Motherhood is out now and it's available, it should be available anywhere that you buy your book. So it's on Amazon, but it's also on Bookshop.org and Waterstones. And yeah. If it's not in a bookshop and you go look for ask them for it. Please. That would be, yeah, thank you.Laura: I will make sure to link to your Substack and links,Jennie: Yes. Thank you. Thank you.Laura: Yeah, I'll link to everything in the show notes and the transcript as well so that people can get ahold of your book. Thank you so much, Jennie, and really appreciate this conversation, and I'm really excited for your book to be out in the world.Jennie: Thank you.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

Hey team! Welcome to episode three of the CIHAS pod, season 2. This week, I’m joined by Dr. Emma Svanberg - clinical psychologist, speaker and campaigner with expertise in attachment and perinatal psychology - AKA Mumologist on IG. In this episode, we focus on some of the stories that we bring to parenting, and the socially constructed ideas we have about parenting. We talk about how sometimes looking for all the advice and answers actually takes us farther away from what we’re looking for, and I ask Emma why she thinks we’re so drawn to advice from so-called parenting experts. Finally, we talk about how we can sift through all the noise of parenting advice, and find what’s best for us and for our kids and learn to leave the rest. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Emma’s here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here’s the transcript in full:Emma: If we are stuck on that idea that this is, you know, the kinda cognitive, that intellectual idea that this is what should happen, it becomes so hard to see our child's experience of what it is that we're trying to do. So again, you know, being able to base those things on the relationship. You know what, what did it feel like when I have prepared this food for my child and they have refused it, or actually they're disgusted by it? How does that make me feel? what does that touch on for me as a parent? And often there are such complex issues with that.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to another episode of Can I Have Another Snack podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Emma Svanberg. You may know her better as Mumologist on Instagram. Emma is a clinical psychologist, speaker and campaigner with expertise in attachment and perinatal psychology. She's co-founder of Make Birth Better and founded the Psychology Collective in 2019, which is a team of practitioners offering psychological support and guidance for the whole family.Today we are gonna be talking about Emma's new book, Parenting for Humans, which is out next month and is available to pre-order now. Now, before you get totally freaked out, this book isn't a book that tells you how to be a better parent or to set up new standards or expectations for how you should parent. Rather, the point of the book is to understand how you were parented and all the experiences that you bring to your parenting with the hope of getting to know yourself better and therefore understand what you are bringing to your relationship with your kid. So Emma and I discuss what some of the stories are that we bring to parenting about what we've learned, about what a parent should be from our own experiences, but also what are socially constructed ideas about parenting.We talk about how sometimes looking for all the advice and answers actually takes us further away from what we're looking for. And I ask Emma why she thinks we're so drawn to advice from so-called parenting experts. Finally, we talk about how we can sift through all the noise of parenting advice and find what's best for us and our kids, and learn to just leave the rest.So we'll get to Emma in just a minute, but first I wanted to remind you that my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop is on Tuesday, the 21st of February. Don't worry, it's not going to be me giving you a bunch of useless tips and tricks, but we will explore your relationship with food and think about how you can support your kids to have a positive relationship with food and their body. I will also give you some practical tools, but my intention is to help you take the pressure off of feeding your kids and help you create a home that supports a healthy relationship to food and bodies. I've linked to the full description in the show notes, so you can check it out. It's 15 pounds. It will be, um, all on Zoom, and I'll have the recording available for a week afterwards that you can watch on catch up if you like. Plus you'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters Guide to share with friends, family, childcare, and schools. So click the link in the show notes and you'll get the full details of what we're gonna talk about in that workshop. And lastly, before we get to Emma, just a quick reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader supported publication. I'd love to bring you more deeply researched pieces, but it requires a significant investment in my time, plus the support of an editor and behind the scenes. Admin support. So if you are in a position to become a paid subscriber, then please consider it. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. It works out at something like 50 p an article. And if that's not accessible for you right now, you can email [email protected], putting the word ‘snacks’ in the subject line, and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked. You don't have to explain yourself. I trust that if you are able to afford a subscription right now, you will, and if not, then just get in touch. All right, team. Here's my conversation with Dr. Emma Svanberg.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Emma, I'd love it if you could start by letting us know who or what you are nourishing right now.Emma: Well, at the moment I am just in the process of nourishing the, I suppose, the next few weeks that are coming up for me, which are all about my new book, that is coming out in March called Parenting for Humans, which is a funny process, right? Because you sort of just dated over a long period of time. And then, uh, you know, as you know yourself, as we get closer to launch date, there are lots of different kinda angles to think about. So at the moment I'm both nourishing trying to, uh, talk about my book, trying to really kind of get to grips with understanding how it's going to resonate with people. I think that's the kinda key thing for me thinking about the ideas that I really want to kind of get out there into the world while at the same time still nourishing myself and my family as best I can.Laura: Yeah. I mean, I remember when I published my first book, I didn't have that same, I didn't have any responsibilities to anyone else except myself. and then when the second book came along, I had a six month old at that point, and it was just a completely different experience and it was such a fine balance to kind of, you know, preserve myself in amongst the chaos of book publishing. So I hope that you're managing to, to find pockets and moments to relax and decompress and, and yeah, tend to yourself because it can be a lot. I don't think people realize that writing the book, editing, fact checking, copy editing, all of the, that whole lengthy, lengthy process is like 50% publishing a book. Maybe? Like there's all of the publicity and everything surrounding that is like, is a huge piece of it.Emma: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what makes it easier is that I'm really excited about this book. I mean, I've also written a previous book that was a very niche specialist book about birth trauma and was also very excited about that one of course, but this book kind of really brings in all of the therapeutic ideas that I've worked with with clients and have done so for many years. So in some ways I think that, you know, in itself, kinda talking about the ideas of the book, um, is something that I'm really enjoying doing and kind trying to figure out, you know, which has always been something that's been really important to me, how do we turn what can feel like really inaccessible, complex psychological concepts into ideas that will make sense to people so that they can very quickly then apply them to their own lives.Laura: So, and you've kind of, you've kind of touched on it a little bit in terms of kind of the, um, maybe more how the book functions, but can you tell us a little bit more about what you are covering in the book, what is the message you're trying to get across?Emma: Um, I think that it started off, the idea came from my experience of working with parents. Um, you know I kind of qualified back in 2009, I qualified but, and the experience that I see parents having over that time has changed so much. So back when I first qualified my role was very much about helping parents, most usually mothers within the NHS and I was seeing people to, you know, kinda really value their role and think about kinda getting support in place, you know, very kinda clear difficulties around, for example, birth trauma or anxiety about bonding with a baby or postnatal depression would be a very common, um, difficulty that I'd see. What's shifted in that time is that there is a whole added layer that has been added on top of that for parents, which is around pressure to do things a certain way, to be a certain way. To parent in a particular way, and that is pressure that is felt by parents, but it's also pressure that then is experienced by children. And what we have then seen kind of come up in, particularly in the last five years or so, is so much advice, so much information about how you can tackle that. You know, try doing it like this. This is a really useful strategy that you could have. These are some really useful words that you can say to your child, but what I then see is parents who've tried that, it's not working for a reason, and then they end up feeling like there's something really wrong with me. I'm a terrible parent, or I'm not doing this well enough, or there's something wrong with my child. My child is broken. Because all of these beautiful strategies are not working. Where we-Laura: I never, sorry. Just that, just like really, that really resonated with, not resonated, but it, it kind of, it struck a nerve that I've thought a lot about how pressure, and I think about this a lot as, as a professional who kind of gives advice and, and shares some of the, the things that you talk about in the book, you know, strategies and advice.Um, I try and be really deliberate and thoughtful and intentional about that. Whether or not that lands is another is, is another thing, but, so I, I think through, you know, at being a parent, think through how that, how much pressure and how much pressure there is on parents in general, how that contributes to anxiety, to guilt, to shame, to all of these things.But I hadn't actually thought about how, what the implication is for our children as well and how they experience that as pressure themselves and how they are embodying some of these ideals and ideas and, and fantasies around, what it means a per, to show up as a parent in a, a person in the world and what that will mean for them as they, as they grow up.So, yeah. Sorry, that just , sorry to interrupt you there, but that just kind of really struck me, what you were saying.Emma: It's so often it's about the dynamic, right? We focus our attentions as professionals onto the parents rather than or onto the child. But actually, I think kinda a really core part of the message of the book is that it's about your dynamic as a family and the relationship that exists between all of the different members of the family.So, you know, you, you as a mother might go off and do loads of reading, loads of research, gather loads of information, try particular strategies, but if they don't click for your child or for your family with your partner or for the context in which you're living in, actually, you can end up feeling like I'm not applying this in the correct way, rather than, actually, maybe that strategy wasn't correct for me and my family and the situation that we're in.Laura: Mm-hmm.Emma: I think for me a lot of that work, cause I, I'm an adult psychologist, I focus on work with kinda adult mental health. You know, for me a lot of that is about us as parents understanding where we're coming from. You know what's important to us, what history we're bringing into our parenting relationship.Once we understand ourselves, it becomes so much easier to understand what will work for our child or for our family, and it also really allows us to see them as the people that they are. That's why it's called Parenting For Humans, right? Cause it's about, you know, how do we parent as the whole humans that we are, not just how we show up as mum or dad, but also then parenting our children for the whole humans that they are, which is, you know, flaws and all. Aside from those kind of idealized stories that we read about or hear about that, you know, kinda describe family life as only fitting a very particular model.Laura: Absolutely. Yeah, you, that's one of the, the main themes that you, you talk about at the beginning of the book, this idea that we hold onto stories about what being a parent means, what it looks like, how we should be as parents, what we should value, and so on, and I'm wondering if you could just say a little more about this idea of stories and the impact that holding so tightly to these fantasies can have on us, on our family life, on those dynamics that you mentioned.Emma: Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, you know, the book is based on this idea of a map that we kinda bring stories onto a map that we don't even know necessarily, that we have. Now might be stories from our own babyhood and childhood and stories from adulthood, stories from society, but also the stories that we've kinda internalized from previous generations, from the cultures that we live in.So, so many stories that we hold unconsciously, the tricky thing for us as adults is that we often don't even know that we're holding those stories until we come up against something that proves them wrong. And there are so many of them in parenthood, right? Like there's the kinda really basic ones like, I dunno, for example, maybe I hold a story that I should be able to put a baby in a blanket, pop it in a cot and it's going to go to sleep and that's just what babies do. That is a story that is so prevalent in our society.You know, think about what you see on tv, what you see in images. You know, those kinda photos that you see of beautiful babies with, you know, angelic faces, fast asleep. And actually then when you experience an actual baby and babies are full of more emotion, that can just change at any moment, you don't always know what that is, because you have that story or maybe you hold that unconscious story that when I put that baby in a blanket and I put it in a crib, it's gonna go to sleep. We're then coming up against that obstacle straightaway when that doesn't work. Cause we internalize that almost like a should, like this is what should happen. And when it doesn't happen, it can often take us quite a while to then think, well maybe that's because that story actually doesn't apply to me, my child, our situation. We then think I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I need a different blanket, maybe I need a different crib, maybe the room temperature's wrong. Maybe my baby has a sleep problem. You know? So we go down that road rather than go that level down and think, what is the story that I've kind internalized here? Is that a story that actually fits for me and for my baby or for my family?Laura: Yeah. I like that idea of kind of peeling back the layers. Like of, okay, this is what I'm told is, you know, could be wrong. Here are all the, you know, as you were listing all those solutions there, I was like, oh my God, there's so many things that we're told that we should do, so many variables that we should, you know, be well, first of all, aware of, and secondly, be able to manipulate. Um, when actually when we strip that away, asking ourselves, does this advice, does this information that I'm sifting through actually apply to me? And, and what is that background story that I've kind of hung, you know, I'm hanging my ideas about my child on, um, and, and, you know, do they actually hold up to scrutiny when we, when we look at them more closely?Emma: Absolutely. And it's, you know, we have to bring them into consciousness before we can hold them up to scrutiny. And that's the bit that often we don't do. Cause we just have so many of these stories. We have so many of these ideas that, you know, just because they're around us all the time, we don't question them.And then as soon as you start questioning them, what often happens is that people have, you know, multiple light bulb moments, right on that journey of parenthood where you suddenly go, oh, why am I doing that actually? Cause that doesn't really work.Laura: I know exactly what you're talking about with those light bulb moments, and I, I remember having one, maybe even, I don't know, as recently as like six or or nine months ago when kind of just, we just got out of, you know, the really, really intense baby phase. It's still pretty intense. But, looking back and, and like thinking about how many of these, you know, like how many stories I suppose I had collected from, you know, parenting books or podcasts or social media accounts or whatever it was.And then having to like really have a talk with myself about like, this is not, this does not apply to me like this , I don't need any of this. This is making things more difficult, more stressful, more pressured for me. And actually, what I noticed was that it was really undermining my own instincts about how I wanted to parent and, and kind of making me second guess myself a lot.Um, and, and as soon as I kind of got to that, it like made things so much simpler. I was like, okay, but is this, does this, you know, now I can look at something and say, okay, but does this actually align with my values? Is this actually helpful to me?Emma: Absolutely. And does it fit?Laura: Does it fit my child? You know, or is it actually gonna cause us more tension or friction or, or whatever it might be.Um, so yeah, I really resonate with that idea of having, being like a sort of light bulb moment and being like, this is trash. We don't need this . Um, and what, what's actually important and valuable for me? There was a part in the book again that really resonated with me, and I think it kind of relates to, um, to what, what we're talking about here. So I have your book and I've, I've highlighted a little section here and I wondered if it'd be okay if I, if I read it back.Emma: Oh, I'd love that. I haven't heard it out loud. So yes,Laura: Have you, you haven't recorded the audio book then yet?Emma: That's coming.Laura: You have that fun to come. So you, you've written, "because when we find ourselves looking for the answers that will make it all easier we can lose sight of the child right in front of us. We have this idea that if we just find the right strategy, the right label, the right technique, the right line to say, perhaps even the right diagnosis, then everything would be okay. Then we'll have cracked it, whatever it is, sleeping, feeding, eating five portions of fruit and veg, good behavior, a healthy relationship. We keep chasing that magic solution and we never stop and look at what is going on right now in ourselves, in our children, and in our families." And yeah, this is such a fine line that I straddle as a practitioner, someone who works with parents and families, how can I be supportive without making it seem like if you just follow my five point plan or my formula , that um, you know, everything will, you know, will solve all, all your problems.I wonder if you could speak to, you know, why we are so drawn to looking to experts to help us figure out how to parent rather than looking at our own child.Emma: I think that there's, well, there's two parts to it, right. There's kinda the context in which we live. So historically we would've lived closer to our families. We would've been part of communities, you know, even when I was a child, absolutely, there was much more a sense of kinda community there, other neighbors around, or more experienced parents who you might come to a particular guidance.So a lot of that has gone, you know, people are parenting much more in isolation. Um, and also in this country, that kind early intervention, preventative care that used to be very much part of the early parenting experience where you'd have a midwife that you knew well, you'd a health visitor that you knew well.There were community nurses that were around, had school nurses, so you know, all of those professionals that you had easy access to have virtually disappeared in the last kind of 15 years. So that has made a huge difference to people's ability to access information. The research shows that people still do turn to their family and friends, first and foremost, for information above experts.I think then when you have maybe particular issues that you are struggling with, where you might want to speak to a professional like you, if you can't access that for whatever reason, then of course there is this, you know, absolute wealth of information that is now available to you on the internet. So I think that there's just a kind practical reality to how differently we live and how that has meant that lots of people have less access to professional expertise then maybe they would have done in the past.There's also, I think, because there's so much more information out there that is accessible on the internet, for example, um, people tend to feel a bit bombarded. So there can be a pressure to feel like you have to choose a particular camp, you know, I follow the expertise of experts who follow like this line of thinking, for example.And then, you know, you can absolutely go down a rabbit hole finding out so much information about this one particular thing. But if that is a, an idea or um, a set of strategies that doesn't really fit your family, it can feel really hard to then pull yourself out that and shift to different, different model, you know, these things are presented to us as different models or strategies rather than flexible ideas that we might be able to apply in flexible ways. And then I also think the kind of other side of it is, I mean, we know this in a wider sense, that we do live in a society that rises perfection. And often when we come to have children, we might have already felt great sense of achievement and success in other areas of our life.And there can be a sense for lots of parents that they're gonna take same set of principles that I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do this well, and by doing it well I have to follow these particular guidelines. If I do these things, and that means that I'm a good parent, and it's almost like we apply that same sense of achievement, productivity, purpose to the act of parenting.What's difficult, of course, is that they children and ourselves change on a daily basis, you know when they're really little they change almost on an hourly basis, so, when we can feel like we're picking that box, we feel like we've got a strategy or a plan that works, if our child changes or our circumstances change, or we change, you know, and, and actually, you know, again, that kinda idea of flexibility can feel quite hard to hold onto. Think it's a combination of lots of different things and, and then of course, you know, supply and demand. The more that we look for expertise, the more experts will share their knowledge with us.Laura: Mm-hmm.Emma: You know it's so easy to be able to go and find a piece of information that we're looking for. And there can be tremendous benefits to that. And again, the research shows that there is a benefit to that. The cost is for people who have that sense of socially oriented perfectionism, where there might be a sense of shame or judgment, when they don't feel like they're meeting this particular ideal, for example, that might be held up to them by the different things that they're kinda reading or hearing.So again, I think, yeah, lots of different reasons. Some, some of them have kinda huge benefits to us in kinda what we have access to, but that also has to be held in mind with what it's costing us in terms of the pressure that we put on ourselves as parents. But also, like we said before, the pressure that then puts on us as a family, in the relationships within the family if not everybody's on board with that way of doing things. So it's important to kind of hold that in mind too. And sometimes, you know, you can take the bits that you need from experts, but essentially what it comes down to is how am I gonna apply this to my situation or our situation? That can be really hard to do.Laura: Mm-hmm. And, and I want to, to talk to you in a second, just a little bit about how we can sort of sift through the noise and, and figure out what, what is valuable and helpful for us. Because as you say, there are things that you know, might, might make a difference and, and might be really important, um, you know, might be great, helpful information for us. But  really appreciated you naming in the book and, and you've said it again here, just sort of this, what I would conceptualize probably as sort of internalized capitalism. This idea to constantly be producing, to be achieving, to be succeeding. And, and as you pointed out in the book, you know, that's how we are, um, schooled. That's, you know, if we go onto further education, that's how we approach our employment. But do we ever take a step back and, and think about why am a, applying the same tools to my parenting and, and my relationships with other human beings as I am to, you know, a, a achieving, um, you know, a certificate or a degree or whatever, whatever it might be. And I just think that, yeah, capitalism has so much to answer for here, both in terms of that and, and how we just approach our parenting. But also going back to what you were saying before about how we used to be so much more in community and around, you know, we would turn to like our parents or maybe like our older siblings or neighbors or cousins or, or whatever it was that were, you know, in proximity to us. And now it's so much easier to just look at, at, at somebody on our phone than it is to like reach out and have a meaningful conversation with someone. And that's because we're, you know, capitalism thrives right, by keeping us isolated, keeping us away from each other, um, when we are, we are so interdependent especially when it comes to, to parenting. And I think about this a lot in terms of how much easier it would be to feed kids if we were more in community. You know, if your neighbors were like taking round a lasagna cuz like you've had this reciprocal thing where like, you know, you each double batch cooked something and then swapped every week so that you ha-, you know, that you were caring for each other in that way and sharing the load and sharing the burden.And also when we're in community, we can see that, yeah. Oh, look, that toddler also doesn't eat vegetables. Cool. All right. it's a toddler thing. Whereas when we, when we look, log into social media, all we hear is like, oh, let's, you know, try and program our children to love broccoli more than they love cake or you know, whatever, whatever it is. So I'm on my high horse now, Emma, but-Emma: So go for it. Go for it. Love it.Laura: I just, I guess kind of thinking, thinking a little bit more specifically about feeding, um, and like the relationship that our children have, um, with food, which I think is so often, well it's a reflection of our own relationship with our food and we with food and our bodies and we, if we have unresolved things there, then that can, can kind of have a cascade effect.But also, you know, I see a lot of generic feeding advice that gets thrown around without nuance or caveats or, or just even the disclaimer of like, it, you don't have to do this if it doesn't work for you and your family. I think, I feel like if people said that more often, that would be really helpful.But this advice ends up adding more pressure to the feeding relationship, which can be counterproductive for feeding, and perpetuates this narrative about a correct or a best way to feed a child. And I mean, we could extrapolate this to almost any element of parenting. It's just I'm interested in feeding.Can we talk about how we can find a way to like sift through the noise and tune into what works for you and your family?Emma: Um, I obviously would say yes, And one of the things that I talk about in the book is kinda, uh, general parenting tools rather than kinda overarching strategies that there are, you know, few key things if you can hold them in mind, then you can apply different advice to your child and your family situation.And for me, one of the most important ones of them is around collaboration. And I think that, you know, what we were talking about before when you were talking about capitalism and that kinda sense of productivity and purpose, how that applies to feeding, and you know, in the home, how we bring our own histories into that too. I think so often when we're, whether we're talking about feeding, whether we're talking about anything else to do with family life, we come to it in a very intellectual way, we're talking about I'm going to apply this principle or I'm going to do it this way, and that's just going to work.What I focus on a lot in the book is that how do we go down into thinking about this as a relationship, which I know you talk about, you know, feeding is a relationship, that we bring our own relationship with food into that, but also our child will have their own experience with food. When we come at things from a cognitive way, you know, we're thinking about this is what I'm gonna apply to this situation and we're not thinking so much about how it's going to land with that other person. Or what they're bringing to that situation.Laura: Mm.Emma: So let's say you followed some beautiful advice that you've seen on social media around talking broccoli, that we're going to feed children broccoli.If we are stuck on that idea that this is, you know, the kinda cognitive, that intellectual idea that this is what should happen, it becomes so hard to see our child's experience of what it's we're trying to do. So again, you know, being able to base those things on the relationship. You know what, what did it feel like when I have prepared this food for my child and they have refused it, or actually they're disgusted by it?How does that make me feel, what does that touch on for me as a parent? And often there are such complex issues with that. Right? In the book, I kinda start off by thinking about us as, as whole human beings and what we're bringing. And then, you know, it's only when we understand ourselves that we can really think about how can we then relate to our children.So with food for example, you know, so much gets brought up for us as parents, where our children, we feel rejected. We feel like we're not doing, you know, good job, I can't even feed my child. It's one of those basic tasks like how can this be so hard? You know, that basic thing that everyone else seems to be doing ok. I must be doing something wrong. So what touches on for you, you know, those feelings of, let's say rejection or, or you know, conversely, maybe it's fury, you know how, how dare they reject this? I've worked so hard, so we're thinking about our own histories.And once we can think about what does that touch on for us, we can then think about, what do we want to shift so that our experience, our emotions aren't getting in the way of what we're trying to do with our child, which is very much a relational process.Once we understand that and we can think about what we're bringing, then we can think about what are those pieces of information advice that do fit? Where are those things actually that I feel like are still niggling, like actually this makes me so angry, so that maybe I wanna go think about that somewhere outside of this situation or circumstances. And it's only really then once we understand all of that, that we can then think about how does that child actually feel about broccoli? You know, do they actually like broccoli?If they don't, what am I gonna do about that? Am I gonna persevere? Is that worth it for me? Do I have the resources? Maybe it's okay for them not to eat broccoli for a little while, while I just get over all emotions that this broccoli has brought in. You know, it seems so simple these are the things that come up for us as parents, you know, multiple, multiple times a day when these particular situations or events can touch something that can feel so fundamental, so emotional, so raw. What we tend to then do is that we bring in more information, more kinda cognitive information so that we try a different strategy rather than than pause at that point and think, why is it that this is bringing up something that feels so powerful for me that is getting in the way of what I want to happen between me and my child?Does that make sense?Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. And, and I think like, just to maybe put it in slightly more, concrete context, at least this is something I've been thinking a lot about recently when I see a lot of advice about feeding our children. It's, you know, there's like, let's take for example, this idea that you shouldn't offer alternatives, right? If the child doesn't like, you know, doesn't eat what's on the table. By, you know, there's this, there's this school of thought by of, of like, well, if you offer alternatives, then your child is manipulating you and you know, you're getting into this battle of wills with your child and you know, setting aside what's going on with the child's psychology there, you're already setting this up as a sort of,Emma: A battle. Laura: A battle. Yeah. Uh, rather than a relationship where, you know, where you might be able to be like, okay, what, what, what's coming up for me when they refuse their broccoli? And Okay. Then once I've, once I've maybe processed that a little bit and, you know, talk myself down off the edge. What's going on for them?Oh, actually, like they have a sensor processing difference or they, you know, there's not enough safe foods on the table, so they can't actually, it doesn't feel, they don't have that sense of felt safety that allows them to come to the table and, and have a meal with the, the rest of the family if you're even eating at a table in the first place.Basically, it actually prevents us from being responsive to the child that is in front of us. And, and I, I know responsive can be kind of like a loaded term for some people, but what I mean by that is literally just being able to see the, the child and their needs and meet them where they're at rather than kind assuming that actually they're trying to manipulate you and,Emma: Totally. And I think we can often have this idea, right, that we as parents are in control and that if our children are not doing the things that we feel like they should be doing, that they're meant to be doing, that other people's children seem to be doing, then that's our failure as a parent and we just need to try harder or we need to work more, or that there's something wrong with them and so we need to work at kinda fixing them. Actually, you know, the relationship between a parent and child is so complex. You know, it's almost, we have this idea that children are like these malleable objects that, you know, if we're just molding them in the right way, then they're gonna come out, the outcome is gonna be the one that we are, you know, striving for.Rather than actually our children come into the world as these whole human beings who have their own thoughts, feelings, needs, beliefs, tastes, you know, and also then within the, the wider context in which we're living. You know, can I afford broccoli at the moment? How do I feel about broccoli? You know, what happened when I refused broccoli at the kitchen table?And how much is that impacting on how I feel now? So, you know, our history, our current circumstances, the relationships that we're in our work environments, our financial circumstances. You were talking about broccoli, but all of those things can really, um, you know, kinda, yeah. Obviously have a huge impact on these kinda very, what seem like very minor circumstances.Laura: Yeah. What does that broccoli represent?Emma: What does broccoli represent?Laura: What's it really about?Emma: I'm thinking about people listening to this and go, yeah, typical psychologist, right? We're talking about broccoli and now I'm talking about like wider society, but actually, you know, because we so often just see that kind of one idea of it's just, it's just about the broccoli and you know, if, if I tried hard enough then I'd be able to mold my child to eat that broccoli or whatever it might be.But when we can take into account everything that we're bringing, everything that they're bringing, our wider circumstances, then we can kinda, yeah, focus in on that relationship as whole people, right? Like this is who I'm showing up to this, you know, this kitchen table and this is who they're, and this is how they're showing up.And you know, all of those kinda different circumstances, how tired they are, all of those things that can get in the way, that once we let go of that idea of this is how it should be, we can start to see what actually is, you know, what actually is in front of us. And then we can, you know, think about solutions to target what is going on in those moments?Laura: I think there is something, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this as well, Emma, that feels uniquely. kind of, yeah. I think you used the word fundamental earlier or primitive or something that, you know, gets to really the core of, um, you know, survival for humans when it comes to feeding that really kind of just, it kind of, it's like a knife gets dug in in a way that it doesn't with, with some other areas of, of parenting that, yeah. It's just such a, an essential part maybe of parent, feeding your child particularly again, I'm thinking to like those early, um, early weeks and months and, and years when, you know, there is that kind of narrative of like, the first 1000 days are the most important of a child's life and you know, what you feed them now is gonna impact their, you know, cognitive development and da da da da da for the rest of their lives.And so I just wonder if, from a psychologist perspective, if you have any thoughts about just like, you know, what that's kind of touching on for us when feeding isn't going well. Emma: I think you're right. I think it's so primitive, you know, that actually so much of parenting is around these kind of really primitive survival mechanisms.Laura: Yeah.Emma: You know that actually our, our role first and foremost is to keep this child alive you know whatever, at whatever cost. And you know, feeding difficulties, can start, you know, from day one. So thinking about, you know, kinda those who have breastfeeding difficulties or feel judged for their feeding choices, for example. And then that can kinda go on so much through food being a representation of love, you know, how did we experience that when we were growing up?And then how do we wanna kinda translate that for our own family again within the context that we're in. So if we're, you know, two parents are working full-time, for example, how does, how, how do we kinda translate that into, you know, eating together or those kinda idealized family meals that we hold in our minds? So I think it can be very fraught. It can be such a fraught experience. And I think it's also an experience that is so judged, right? You know, thinking about feeding babies, thinking about what kinda food we give our toddlers, thinking about, you know, the, all of the stories that you've spoken about, diet, culture, obesity, all of that kinda, it can get really mixed. Our own relationships with our bodies, our own relationships with food, and how that comes up in our experience of feeding our children, how well supported we are in that, you know, financially. Again, kinda how that, how that can impact on what we're able to offer our children. So, I think, you know, it is the way that we express love, it's the way that we kinda show our children that we care about them. At the same time, there is so much pressure to do it a certain way so it can become so fraught so quickly.Laura: Yeah.Emma: And we also don't talk enough about how boring it can be to feed children day in and day out.Laura: It's so relentless. Three meals, three snacks. Like, oh, you don't like this anymore. Suddenly you like that.Emma: And especially, you know, when, you know, you've kind of been, if you've raised children during lockdowns and you literally, you know, it was almost like a constant rotation of food over lockdowns. So, you know, I think that we don't talk enough about that kinda ambivalence around, you know, not just parenting tasks, but parenting in general.But, you know, again, the idea is that we're have this kinda lovely, you know, food environment that, um, we're gonna share these kinda pleasant meals together where the family are coming together to talk about their day. All of this kinda, again, kinda back to stories, narratives, ideals that we hold when actually for a lot of parents, food is something that can just feel quite boring and quite relentless and, and often very stressful.And, and you know, as soon as we start talking about that side of things too, the more difficult, the more negative side of things. Often we can feel a sense of relief that actually it doesn't have to be this one ideal way that actually all of these experiences can be so complex and varied with individual.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for, for speaking to the, to that point and, and I think naming how Yeah. Tedious feeding a family can be. And we were kind of talking a little bit off mic. I have a piece coming out next week that talks about, um, feeding a child as an aesthetic. Like that's what we see so much of on, on, um, social media when actually if, if we're feeding with that per- like idealized image in our head. Again, it occludes us from seeing the child in front of us and being in relationship with that child and, and food can be, You know, again, without romanticizing it, it can be ti-, a time for connection and for checking in. It can also just be a cluster fuck, sometimes and through nobody else, you know, through no one's fault.Um, just because you, sometimes you have to just get food in their mouths to sustain them to get to the next activity or like, you know, to grandma's house or what, you know, whatever it is. So, um, yeah, I think. I really appreciate that you know, that you're having these conversations where we're looking at the messy, ugly, boring, tiring, exhausting side of it, but not in this like meme-ified way that we often see that that sort of like really trivializes how exhausting and draining and how much hard work all of this is.But yeah, I really appreciate that in your, in the book that you're kind of inviting us to check in with what, what stories and fantasies we're bringing to our parenting that actually might be causing us more suffering and, and, and harming the relationships that we're having with, with our families so that we can kind of, you know, give ourselves permission to take what we need and leave the rest ofEmma: Yeah. Yeah. And you can get really creative then, right? Like once you let go of those ideas and you think about what do I want? What do we need as a family, you can get really creative with the way that you do things.Laura: Yeah.Emma: You know, for example, feeding children in the bath, that is something that somebody that I know does, you know, occasionally when they've had a really tricky day and it's been an absolute shitshow, I'm like, you know we're gonna get in the bath, you can have some sandwiches, that means I don't need to do any cleaning up, and then I'm gonna pop you into bed and I'm going to sit on the sofa and that is not something that you'd ever see on Instagram, I don't think.But you know, just that kinda idea of what, what is gonna work for me? And what do I need right now and what does my child need right now? And maybe they don't need to have this kinda really beautiful aesthetic, aesthetically pleasing, mealtime actually. Maybe they just need to eat something quickly so that you can then move on with your day or have connection in a different way, and if you know, as you know, and you talked about, you know, the stress that can come with feeding can cause such a vicious circle so quickly that actually anything that you can do to kinda nip that in the bud and again bring in ideas around flexibility, creativity. What's gonna work so that you can feed your child but also in a way that feels the least stressful for all of you?Laura: Yeah, absolutely. I fully endorse toast for dinner. If that's like, you know what you need to do to like put something in their bellies and get them to bed. Like as long as they're having enough to eat, then yeah, we're good. Emma, thank you so much. This has been a really great conversation. Before I let you go, I want to ask you who or what is nourishing you right now?Emma: Um, well at the moment I've been really focused on kinda restoration, so I think last year I did a lot of work around kinda reflection over the pandemic experience that parents had and how burnt out so many are, given the experiences of the past few years that are continuing. But at the moment, what I'm really kinda nourishing myself with, so a particular person, Lama Rod, who is an amazing meditation teacher and started to run these Thursday meditation groups, for UK people, cause he's based in the States. So, I've been kind of really consuming a lot of his work and his presence is just incredibly helpful and healing and I really love what he has to say about this particular time that we live in. I think that you'll really like him. He has a lot to say about you know, he calls this the age of apocalypse that we are coming into, we're in dark times at the moment, but there actually is by embracing that darkness that we can start to think about what we wanna shift into the future. So very much about, you know, not being afraid of embracing the dark, messy stuff, which is something that feels, really resonates with me.Laura: I think that, um, it reminds me of Bayo Akomolafe's work. I don't know if you're familiar with their book, um, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences where they talk about that in terms of like climate crisis and, um, but also like racism and parenting. They're a parent. It's like, there's also some like nuclear physics or something in there. It's like, it's a really dense dense book. But, um, I'll, I'll link to that and I'll link to, sorry, what say the name of the, the per-, the,Emma: His name is Lama, Lama Rod Owens, and he's on Instagram, but he also has stuff on the internet and he does a number of courses. He also wrote a book, so.Laura: Okay. I'll link, definitely link to, to them in the, in the show notes. And then the final question I have for you, Emma, is, what are you snacking on right now? So at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something. It's like a recommendation that they have for the audience. It can be an actual snack. I mean, I feel like you've just given us a recommendation, but I want another one. Like what you've been into lately.Emma: I am snacking on rest, which I think, you know, the, again, we can often have this idea that we have to do these things in a perfect way. That you know, what our kind of recovery journey might look like, having a few years where I think things have been so intense, you know so many families... You know that if we talk about kinda how, you know, self healing or wellness journeys, often we're talking about, I'm up and meditate for an hour in morning. You just can't do that when you've got children, or it's hard to do that when you've got children, so I am a big fan of snacking on moments of rest, you know moments during the day to just reset yourself. So even just sitting with your eyes closed, taking a few deep breaths.Or just thinking about the ground beneath your feet or just stopping, you know, so that you're not just going and going and going all day, but when you taking a moment to check in with yourself and just see how you are.Laura: I love that microdosing on rest throughout the day.Emma: Absolutely.Laura: Love it. Okay, so my, I feel like my thing is kind of just silly, but in a, in a good way. So we are recording this in January, 2023. So we're just coming out of like the holiday blah, whatever that was. But I just came across last, at the end of last week, the 2022 Haters Guide to the Williams Sonoma catalog.So I'm not sure if you're familiar with what Williams Sonoma is, but it's this US based brand and it's like if you think about like a John Lewis or like, you know, a higher end department store, but on steroids. Um, that's Williams Sonoma. It's like all these wildly expensive, like, you know, like a countertop pizza oven.Like nobody needs that in a flat in London, you know, like who needs that? Who has the kitchen space for that? And it's like, you know, everything is, like, all the kitchen appliances are like $500 and stuff. But anyway, this guy just goes through a bunch of items in the Williams Sonoma, um, catalog takes like the copy that they've written in there and just rips it a new one, just tears into it and it's hilarious and it's very cathartic, um, and highly enjoyable. So I'll link to that, I know we're like, out of Christmas season and holiday season. But, um, I think it's still worthwhile to have a little look at and, um, you can watch out for the 2023 one if you're listening to this later in the year. All right, Emma, can you tell everyone the name of your amazing new book and where they can find out more information about you?Emma: Uh, yes. So I am Mumologist on Instagram and loads of my kinda links and everything are on there. Or my website is dremmasvanberg.com. The book is called Parenting for Humans, and it's out on March 2nd which is World Book Day, which I love.Laura: Lovely. That's so,Emma: So, you know, I'd again love it if people would pre-order it. That makes a big difference. But yeah, if people do get their hands on it, I'd love to hear what people make of it.Laura: We'll have all of the links for Emma's books and her social media and her website in the transcript and in the show notes for this episode. So check her out. Thank you so much, Emma. This was,Emma: Thank you.Laura: will be really reassuring for a lot of parents to just hear that, Okay we can let go of some of the pressure and expectations and just check in with ourselves and figure out what it is that we need and what we want from our relationships.Emma: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for chatting.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

Today I’m joined by dietitian and activist Jessica Wilson to discuss her new book It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies - a book that uplifts and celebrates Black women.In the episode we talk all about what drove Jessica to write the book and why we need to re-centre the experiences of Black women in our conversations about bodies and eating disorders. Jessica shares some of her critiques of intuitive eating and body positivity, and why white supremacy isn’t the root of diet culture, but the whole damn tree. Plus, lots of Lizzo chat and great Snacks. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Jessica here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here’s the transcript in full:Jessica: And so, so quickly it became diet culture has racist roots. And that was the concession. Like, we need to talk about both of these things in anti-diet spaces. And the way that we're gonna do it is say that diet culture, you know, make it really like this tree analogy. Uh, and then just happens to have racist roots.Whereas I see white supremacy as the tree, it's what's sticking up out of the ground. It's what we can see. It's what is, you know, ruling and governing and decides, you know, who is able to fit under its branches. And I, you know, shrinking ourselves via, maybe that's the connection to diet culture there, is one way people are trying to seek shelter under this, you know, umbrella, this tree of white supremacy.INTROLaura: Hey team, and welcome to another episode of Season Two of Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter.I can't wait to share today's conversation with dietician and activist Jessica Wilson, who is also author of the forthcoming book, It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies. I've linked to this book in the show notes because you need to go and pre-order it immediately. So in this conversation you'll hear Jessica and I discuss her new book. We'll talk about some of the ideas that she presents in the book, like how the body stories and narratives of Black women are raised and silenced in conversations about health, wellness, and body positivity. Jessica tells us about why if we distill difficulties with food down to just the thin ideal, we end up missing a lot of the complexity of how Black women are told to be figuratively and literally smaller as a matter of survival. We talk about how intuitive eating and rejecting diet culture don't address systemic issues like anti-fatness and anti-blackness. And they perpetuate the idea that we need to find individualistic solutions to systemic and structural violence. We talk about how white supremacy and anti-blackness isn't at the root of diet culture, but how, in Jessica's words, it's the whole damn tree. We talk about Lizzo and respectability, resilience and toxic body positivity, and loads and loads more. I think I'm gonna be unpacking this book for a long time to come, and I'm just so grateful to Jessica for writing it and I think as a white person, I mean, my opinion doesn't really matter here, but I feel like it's important to sit with the discomfort and the critiques and reflect on the ways that I've perpetuated some of these harmful systems and narratives. And if you're a white person in this space, whether for personal or professional reasons, you need to get this book and also sit with that discomfort.So again, It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Stories of Black Women's Bodies, and it's available to pre-order now and it will be out on the 7th of February. The pre-order links are in the show notes. It goes without saying that we talk about themes around anti-blackness and enslavement and anti-fatness. So if you're a black person or a fat person, please take care of yourself if you choose to listen to this conversation.All right, before we get to today's conversation with Jessica, I just want to share that I'm gonna be running my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop again in February. It will be a 90 minute workshop. Completely online and you will be sent a copy of the recording afterwards to watch back. We'll talk about how kids’ embodiment gets disrupted by diet culture, and what this has to do with feeding. We'll discuss why we need to throw the rule book out of the window and let them have ice cream before broccoli, and how we can help build trust in our kids to get what they need. I'll offer a framework that can help you feel more relaxed about mealtimes, whilst encouraging kids to have autonomy. We'll talk about how providing supportive structure can encourage children to remain in touch with their internal cues for hunger, satisfaction, pleasure, and fullness. And I'll cover how fussy eating develops, and other developmental milestones as well as tools to help support our kids through them. We'll talk about why cutting out sugar and saying things like just another bite can undermine kids' instincts around food, and we'll cover how to talk about food and bodies without harming. You'll be asked to fill out a short questionnaire about your specific situation ahead of time, and I'll try to tailor the content to the audience as much as possible. You'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters download. The workshop is suitable for grownups of kids of all ages, but best probably for kids under 12. Parents, whatever that means to your family, grandparents, teachers, nutrition professionals, and anyone else working with kids are more than welcome to join. It'll be on Tuesday, the 21st of February, also pancake day, that's seven o'clock and it's 15 pounds to join. Full details and booking information is in the show notes and the transcript for this episode.And just before we get to Jessica, just a quick reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader supported publication and podcast. I'd love to bring you more deeply researched pieces like my piece on clean eating and kids from a couple weeks ago, but it requires a significant investment in my time, plus the support of an editor. So if you are in a position to become a paid supplier, then please consider it, it's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. And if that's not accessible to you right now, you can email [email protected] uk, putting the word “snax” in the subject line, and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked. You don't need to justify yourself. Just send that email with “snax” in the subject line and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription.Okay, team, here is my conversation with Jessica Wilson.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Jessica. I'd love it if you could tell us who or what you are nourishing right now.Jessica: That will be a big what. Laura, you're the first person that I get to talk to on a podcast and share that my book, It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies will be out finally in 2023. So I am putting all of my energy and capacity into taking that book across the finish line.Laura: They don't tell you when you sign that book deal, that the publishing part, like the promoting, the marketing, all of that stuff is like more work than just like the writing part and the editing part, which is also a lot.Jessica: It is and at least you know like where you're going with that. You know where the book ends, begins and is in the middle, but then this nebulous like what is happening afterwards, that is also more work. Yeah. I was not prepared. I recommend somebody write a book about what it's like to write a book.Laura: I know we need that book.Jessica: Yeah. It never ends, it never slows down is the summary.Laura: But that's also a good sign. Like if they're keeping you busy with lots of marketing stuff, that's a good sign. And for good reason because I have been one of the very privileged people to read an advanced copy and I'm just, I'm so excited about this book. I think you've done such an amazing job of like dissecting these, like really difficult to, to digest and process ideas, but you've woven it, interwoven it with like humor, and like historical context and pop culture references and, and like, it just, it's like a pleasure to read it even though it's like really difficult to to read. So tell, can you tell the audience what the book is about and what it is that you're trying to say through this book?Jessica: I think that there were two parts of it, um, in my career as a dietician for, ooh, 15, I don't know, 17 years we'll say. Um, and even before that, the ways that we've talked about eating disorders, the ways that we've talked about eating always centers, like white folks experiences and the ways that eating disorders are supposed to present are how they present in very thin white girls and women.And like I was trained with all of that knowledge and it just was falling flat on its face when I was working with anybody else who wasn't thin, white and a cis woman in my work. And I also didn't have any other Black dietician colleagues, we only make up like 3% of the dietician field. And so I had no one to talk to about it.Um, like very lost reading Carolyn Costin's book, which again, you know, it's not anything new, it's just the same old centering of the same people. Um, so it wasn't like years or decades later that I realized that all of this needed to be in one place. I was having so many conversations, but how can we put all of this and give it context in a place and in a time where, you know, diet, culture and intuitive eating are becoming so much to the lexicon. And it still wasn't as complex as I really needed it to be.Laura: Mm-hmm. Yeah. There's a lot of nuance missing from those conversations and a lot of people missing from those conversations. Like in the book, you detail, you know how there are a few, like, I mean, it is like a few old white dudes in the eating disorder field that have written all the manuals, all the textbooks, all the protocols, all the psychometric testing everything,Jessica: Mm-hmm.Laura: to center their ideas about who gets an eating disorder, how it presents, and what the root causes are, which you completely obliterate in like the first couple of chapters.Jessica: The idea that it's all about beauty, right, is one that I for sure, you know, was trained in. It was everybody wanting to be thin and thin for beauty's sake. And because we have very thin models, like that's why people want to shrink themselves. Um, and yeah, just to be prettier and as we, you and I have discussed, and you know, other communities as well. Uh, folks of color, particularly black women in this book, can find a lot of survival and safety by making themselves both, uh, literally and figuratively smaller. So by shrinking, you know, in spaces where we're told we're too much, or even, you know, before we can be told we're too much, shrinking ourselves is one way to find that, you know, survival in white supremacy and then also of course for fat folks mitigating anti-fatness, um, by, you know, starving oneself is one way to find a bit more peace, even if it is not, you know, both sustaining and nourishing, I guess, for them.Laura: Yeah, it's a survival mechanism. It's a way of living in a world that is openly hostile to you and trying to make that as, as easy as possible for yourself. And even then, it's not easy. It's still not easy.Jessica: Yeah. And some people hear, you know, this conversation and I've had comments on Instagram that, you know, say, well, it sounds like you're saying it's okay to have an eating disorderLaura: Jesus fucking Christ.Jessica: And I'm like, no, I understand why you're saying that. I totally see why when I say I understand why you're starving yourself, to somebody who could be triggered to hear, I approve of you having an eating disorder.But yeah, that's not what is going on.Laura: That's a real red herring.Jessica: Yeah. The compassion, the understanding, and then also like eating disorder recovery is not going to make the things that they are, you know, somewhat solving by becoming smaller. They're not gonna make those things go, like magically go away.So how do we have a really, really hard conversation that talks about not just eating intuitively and recovering, but like the harms of society.Laura: Yeah. You're not saying that restriction, deprivation and trying to micromanage everything that you eat and trying to shrink your isn't unpleasant. You're saying, you're, it's not un-Jessica: or differently harmfulLaura: Yeah,  it's one way of trying to survive in a world that's really unsafe. And what you were saying is like these are the options availableJessica: Mm-hmm.Laura: The, the options are try and reform, conform through restriction and deprivation and, uh, you know, through effectively self-harm or endure the, you know, more microaggressions or overt aggression um, because you, you're even farther from the white ideal, is that like. Jessica: And what society finds acceptable. There is no easy path. under white supremacy for those whose bodies don't align with what, you know, Puritan culture had in mind. And that we continue to value as a, as a society. So there really is no easy path forward. And all of us are really trying to do the best we can.Laura: And I think you kind of touched on this as well, but you talk about, in the book that, you know, rejecting diet culture and embracing anti-diet, intuitive eating approaches to eating is not the one, it's, it's not gonna save us. That these are oversimplifications of, you know, what, what needs to happen, what needs to change.Do you wanna kind of touch on that a little bit more and, and explain why, why you think that is?Jessica: I think you teed it up really nicely when we talked about the safety and survival that people can find in shrinking themselves. Intuitive eating in all of its, you know, forms, fashion and principles like is not going to make anti-fatness or anti-blackness go away. So even if I, you know, are open to start eating again, if I've been restricting and in deprivation and I want to embrace intuitive eating, the reasons that I had shrunk myself initially, like will arise, and intuitive eating is not going to be like that solution. I will still be experiencing the other things. Again, also, it's an individual solution to a societal problem. And I often find that, you know, me asking you, Laura, to participate in these like rituals, these um, principles, you know, really puts the onus on you as a person that needs to solve a problem that you did not create.Laura: Hmm.Jessica: And as a clinician, you know, that doesn't read well to me. And I also, um, I want people to think less about food because, you know, as you know, as we deprive ourselves, the amount of times and amount of time spent thinking about food goes up exponentially.And so I don't like to really organize people's existence around, you know, always thinking about their food, but also not having like specifics as a, as a field. In the book I talk about talking to three of my white eating disorder specialist, dietician friends, and I said, how are they talking about intuitive eating these days?And I say that all three of them, you know, took their hands like butterfly wings across their chest and like fluttered them a bit. That's how you'll know if you're eating intuitively, was the message. And I was like, what does that mean? What are we doing as a field if a solution to a societal problem involves both like rigidity and fluttering hands.It's just, it's not the solution we need to society.Laura: Look, you know, that I have been an advocate of intuitive eating, have been, you know, I've talked a lot about it. I've written two fucking books about intuitive eating. But as I read that part of your book, I like threw up in my mouth a little bit. I was like, not, not actually like that butJessica: Yes.Laura: But, I was just like, that's gross. That, it was just really upsetting to read that that's, what it's been reduced down to is just like this, like ethereal feeling , that that's what intuitiveJessica: When you know, you'll know . No,Laura: that's fucked up, it's really fucked up and I'm kind of, you know, becoming more and more aware of how, um, sort of evangelical people are about intuitive eating. And I hope that, something that I've kind of gotten across in my books is that if we are, you know, if, if you are trying to practice intuitive eating to the letter and you're so inflexible in those principles, that's a diet and that you are recreating, reproducing the same ways of thinking and patterns of of being as, as, as in a diet. So what, we're not actually achieving anything. And like you, like the goal is, is to not think that much about food apart from like, okay, I need to eat something. What do I have available to me? Or do I need something in like,Jessica: Do I have enough groceries? Have I packed a snack?Laura: This is really important. Like, it's very important to bring snacks.Jessica: But yeah. Um, in the religiosity. I fully agree. And, see the connection again with the idea that we should be only eating for biological reasons, is another way the religiosity flows in there. Because, you know, I made the connection, my boss made the connection between that and the like, only have sex for procreation. Um, and just like wear these, like deny yourself pleasure, deny yourself, you know, so many things unless it's in a religious context and then you're able to have sex or then you're able to enjoy food if it's only for biological reasons. So never, and have pleasure with food or sex. So yeah, I definitely see the evangelism and religiosity forLaura: It is, and there's also just like this, I mean, I was literally shoving toffee in my mouth as I was reading that section, like, which is just funny. But, yeah, there is this distortion and I think that the way that that intuitive eating is, is talked about and how it's been popularized and, and this, because it's, it's come from the intuitive eating book is, as you say, this denial of pleasure, this, um, denial of our appetite and the fact that we eat outside of these very like narrow, very specific, parameters and that it, like, it's fine if you like are passing a window like a bakery and you see something and you're like, that looks good. I wanna eat that. Like, yeah. To, to just reduce hunger down to, or reduce eating down to only, only eating when you're hungry is, is ludicrous. But it, it's also really harmful because, uh, you know, I've, I've been in the room with clients who are like, but I, you know, when do I eat? And like the mental acrobatics of it all is a lot.There's, yeah, there's this other thing that I've seen happening with intuitive eating that makes me so deeply uncomfortable is how it's just become this like, really, it's like girl boss feminism, but for food. Do you know what I mean? Jessica: Tell me more. No, I love this. Where's this going?Laura: I think I maybe got this idea from Toi Smith who, I don't know if you know Toi, a Black woman who, she talks a lot about capitalism and the effects of capitalism on our lives. She has a lot of great things to say, but she talks about the commodification of wisdom that is just innate to humans, right?Jessica: Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah,Laura: Like it's something that we kind of know in our bodies and how white women in particular sort of repackage this and try and sell it you at a premiumJessica: Mm-hmm.Laura: and like that's what I feel like intuitive eating has become. And I see this a lot happening with child feeding, right? Like, we're going way off topic. We will come back to your book, I promise, but like, um, like the weaning industrial complex,Jessica: Oh,Laura: right?Jessica: yeah.Laura: I don't need to take a £200 course to teach my child how to eat. Like humans have been doing that since the beginning time, right?Jessica: Mm-hmm.Laura: And like, what the fuck, what am I paying you to tell me how to like cut up a piece of food? Like that's like innate knowledge and that we have as humans and it should be freely available to everyone, right?Jessica: Yeah. Hmm. The weaning industrial complex. Laura: Don't get me started cuz I have a lot of feelings about it, Jessica. But it's that kind of, you know, like, like eating is something so fundamental and so in, you know, inherent to our existenceJessica: Mm-hmm.Laura: Why are we paying to learn how to do that?Jessica: Definitely.Laura: Okay. I've gone way off, off piste here, but let's, let's bring it back to the book and, and I think we've kind of like touched on this a little bit in different ways, but I, I wanna ask you a bit more directly, like, you've talked a lot about this on social media as well, and in fact you gave a really, I think, helpful analogy that I'll ask you to share in just a second. But since the sort of social reckoning that wasn't in 2020 it's become cool, it's become trendy in the anti diet HAES space to talk about how anti-blackness and white supremacy are at the root of diet culture.Jessica: Right?Laura: Let it rip. JessicaJessica: Um, let's see. I'm not sure like chicken or the egg. I don't know if you have that expression in the UK or not. Um,Laura: That one translates.Jessica: Okay. I'm not sure which one came first cuz uh, there was a, it was a very short period of, uh, time during which people all of a sudden, in, you know, eating disorder community and dietician community, um, who were like talking about diet culture. And then all of a sudden in 2020, um, all of a sudden, you know, people are talking about race in ways that have not been done before. And so it was like this, how do we squeeze in this very important conversation about racism into this conversation as a field that we've already been having.And so, what, you know, Black Lives Matter. What Black folks, what our Black colleagues like me and Alicia McCulloch, you know, we're talking about bodies and the harm that white supremacy has caused for,Laura: mm-hmm. Jessica: ever, and anti-diet spaces, we're talking about the harms of dieting forever. I see that the origins of white supremacy, you know, are really what are impacting, like directly impacting both anti-fatness and anti-blackness in the US at least.And so, so quickly it became diet culture has racist roots. And that was the concession. Like, we need to talk about both of these things in anti-diet spaces. And the way that we're gonna do it is say that diet culture, you know, make it really like this tree analogy. Uh, and then just happens to have racist roots.Um, whereas I see white supremacy as the tree, um, it's what's sticking up out of the ground. It's what we can see. It's what is, you know, ruling and governing and decides, you know, who is able to fit under its branches. And I, you know, shrinking ourselves via, maybe that's the connection to diet culture there, is one way people are trying to seek shelter under this, you know, umbrella, this tree of white supremacy.Laura: And you give some examples in your book and I think that they're really helpful for illustrating what you mean because, and I'm speaking for myself here, like when it, it takes a long time to get your head around diet culture as a concept anyway, right? WhenJessica: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.Laura: been coming from like the, the, the weight normative paradigm that you and I were both in. Right? So like that, it's kind of like a head fuck just to even get your head around that begin with, but then take it to the next level, which actually this isn't even diet culture, this is something else entirely.Jessica: Right.Laura: Like, and, and maybe this is just me, being, like this is my ignorance or my privilege showing, but it's taken me a while even after reading, like Fearing the Black Body and reading Deshaun's work to like get to this point.So I'm just wondering if some examples, they were helpful for me reading them in your book. So I'm just wondering if it'd be helpful in other people's books. What am I saying? It would be helpful to illustrate for other people.Jessica: Well, I think people might love to hear the ones that resonated with you, you know? Cause they probably share a lot of your experiences.Laura: I think, I think both the stories of Mia and LexiJessica: Okay.Laura: Were really illustrative. Um, so I don't know. Which one would you like to tell?Jessica: We can talk about Lexi since she's now, you know, a US transplant into the Uk. Laura: I feel like I need to call her up and be like, Hey, should grab a coffee ? Jessica: Maybe she could be on your podcast, you know?Laura: I'm sure she could. I know she's been on your podcast and I need to go back and listen to that. But yeah, get her on the podcast.Jessica: Yeah. So gymnasts from age three, and really enjoy doing all of the gymnastics events. So there's floor, there's the uneven bars, there's beam, and then there's floor. And within the gymnastics community, the idea is that the beam balance beam and the uneven bar bars are like the elegant events. And inherently in gymnastics, you know, uh, only the white gymnasts are able to be elegant.Any and all black gym gymnasts are assumed to be more muscular, more powerful, and they're gonna be great on the floor and great on the vault. And Lexi wanted to do all of the events and was good at them. Uh, but, you know, saw that the thinner, whiter girls were getting higher scores. So being an athlete and very driven, she's like, I know how to be thinner and get, you know, therefore get better scores.So just, you know, started participating, you know, In deprivation, in restriction, in laxative use, um, in the like cleansing, cayenne, lemon water situation and eventually purging. But there was no, like, she was never like, I want to feel better about my body. You know, she was never fat. She just wanted to be metaphorically and physically smaller, to be more palatable to the judges, predominantly white judges who were judging her.She was never like, you know, I'm worried about the thin ideal. It just wasn't about the same stuff, you know, that we are told about diet culture and what diet culture means. Um, it just wasn't that.Laura: Yeah. So, yeah. In the eating disorder literature, all we're ever offered is, you know, people are trying to shrink their bodies because it brings them in closer proximity to the thin ideal. And that's the apex of human being like, that's all we’re aiming for.Jessica: It's because they feel bad about their bodies.Laura: Yeah. Which we do get that message to an extent. But what you are saying is it's more than that. It's a lot deeper than that. It's a lot more harmful than that. And it's rooted in the origins of the American, well America as a country and chattels and enslavement, um, of Black people.And, and it goes all the way back to that and the, the, like we were saying at the beginning, the safety that is afforded to people who have closer proximity to whiteness. Is that like a fair summary?Jessica: Yeah, I think that you helped me out, uh, realizing that I had just jumped in with Lexi and gymnasts and not taken it back to enslavement, um, hundreds of years ago. Right? So the depiction of Black women then, you know, as strong as powerful, basically because they were laborers either out in the field or in the house, but just the constant valuation of Black women for their labor, um, continues today.And so, yeah, Black gymnasts are used for their power and their strength in their events. And so like, it's been hundreds of years, but the narratives of Black women are still there and they're ones that we did not ask for. So that's how I say, you know, the body narratives have always been written by white supremacy in a way that Black women will never, you know, have access to, you know, a validating body story unless it's rewritten.Laura: And what you just said there about, um, you know, this, the story of, of Black women's bodies being about power, being about strength. That was, again, if we think, think of it in historical terms because they had no choice, right? That was the, literallyJessica: They were put to work.Laura: But in the book, you kind of bring this into a modern context as well, which, um, and, and you talk about it through the lens of, um, resilience.And, and so if it's okay, I wanna just read a short passage, um, from the book. And so you say Black women often take on the false idea that we have superhuman strength and resilience in the meantime, sacrificing our physical and mental health, trying to make ourselves fit into a society that will never accept us. This replicates centuries of lacking body autonomy for Black women of being denied agency in how we tend to our bodies.Jessica: Yeah.Laura: And I think like this really, like who hit a nerve for me? Um, not hit a nerve in like a negative way, but it likeJessica: Sure.Laura: it made an impression. I really had to think about it. Um, and so sort of, I mean, did you want to speak to this point any? Jessica: Yeah, what stood out to me and then I was able to bring up at other times with the autonomy here and how conforming indeed can bring back some of what has been lost in people's writing our own stories. But at what cost, right? Yeah. So, Indeed it is hard. it was hard to write. It's hard to listen to. But again, knowing it's important, which I think at the beginning you'd said that I, you know, had wrapped in some, uh, humor, often dry humor, pop culture, um, a lot of, you know, really personal stories so that folks could, you know, have some balance and really get to the end of it, the book, rather than, you know, just deciding it's hard and not finishing. Yeah. But did the passage or what stuck out to you in the, in the passage?Laura: Well, I think it was kind of more, I guess I wanna bring it back to another part of the, this same chapter where you're talking about resilience, and you sort of, without like making a song and dance about it, you, you kind of differentiate between resilience that is embodied and innate and inherent versus resilience that is performed as an act of survival through, um, through the, through autonomy being forcibly removed, violently and forcibly removed.And, I think that there, like, it just made me think about how there is a lot of stereotyping about Black wo women being strong and, um, you know, having to as you say in the book, like literally and figuratively, having to clean up everybody else's mess, um, and carrying like so much for the rest of us.I suppose it brought me back to just like, I just felt so, like, I just felt really sad, like really, really sad that that's, um, you know, I was thinking about some of my Black, my friends who are Black women and, um, just yeah, how this, it was just really upsetting to, to, to think about, just everything that's expected of Black women and everything that they're carrying. But then there was also this most, this more kind of optimistic, hopeful piece in like, resilience that's embodied, that's like innate. That's just that, that's something that, um, you know, is developed through community and through, um, Black joy and some of the things that you go on to, you know, some of them were , uplifting things that you talk about in the book. So, yeah. Did you mean to like draw that distinction between the two pieces or is that just, am IJessica: I love how, no, which is great because I have more, um, yeah, language. That's super helpful and a great reflection. I think in that chapter tI alk about like, my needing to have been performing resilience in particular situation, and I just couldn't, and, you know, therefore I was then, you know, disposable to the organization at the time. Um, because as you know, you know, folks with chronic illnesses and other things, like there is just a max. And at some point, like, my body just can't fulfill the demands of society for me to, you know, put everything else, uh, before myself, et cetera. Sometimes I actually have to put myself first. Though yeah, not being able to do that performance is, you know, both like considered and ingrained as a failure for me. You know? And I assume other Black women, like we are known for our strength, you know, you can always rely on us. Um, and when, you know, we cannot be relied upon for Black girl magic, like that's devastating.Laura: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.Jessica: Yeah. But then the other, yes, the innate resilience or the, Hmm. I wouldn't say tools gained through community, but maybe the, maybe it is. A friend of mine called joy as a weapon, the way I was writing about it as like a way to weaponize the, um, assumptions made about us and our bodies, and I loved that. So yes, resilience in two different ways.Laura: Okay. So I mentioned that you weave in some most excellent pop culture references and a piece that I enjoyed reading was your thoughts on Lizzo and respectability and all the shit that went down, around about that. So, summarize what you talk about in that chapter.Jessica: I start the chapter by talking about Lizzo's uh, decision to eat smoothies that she made at home. Uh, apples and peanut butter, protein bars, tea, something, pickles. Yes. That's. So it was smoothies and those snacks for 10 days and she had said, you know, two of us. 2020 had been a really shitty year. And, know, her stomach was real fucked up. And so, you know, she decided to go on what she called a smoothie detox. And the internet lost its mind. It was like when it's like you wake up to like an actual news story on social media, but this was like Lizzo is, is drinking smoothies was the actual news storyLaura: A like slow news day when you think about it, but like theJessica: That's probably why. yeah, that's actually probably true. Uh, it was in the period between Thanksgiving and, and New Year's maybe. Um, so yeah, the internet had big thoughts and it was one of those times where I was able to see those who were, you know, triggered, um, and probably weren't doing so well in their own, you know, mental health and recovery that got very, very triggered. One particularly, um, Jameela Jamil, who's over UK and in US. Yeah. Posted her own story of like engaging in some sort of like detox situationLaura: Oh, is that who it was? I was reading your book and I was like, come on, you coward name herJessica: Well,Laura: But you did on the,Jessica: She, yeah, she's mentioned ambiguously. Um, but yes, a whole cautionary tale of I almost died doing a cleanse. Don't do cleanses. Um, and you know, it was very clear for her, uh, Jameela Jamil that, you know, she had done so in the context of her eating disorder in order to lose weight.And I was like, but wait, did Lizzo say anything about wanting to lose weight? Like, I didn't catch that. Like I went back. Saw what she was eating. There were solid foods. Like, it was like portrayed as this weird, cleansy. I don't know what like the assumptions made about cleanses are, but there was like actual food there.I was watching it, it may have, may have not been, you know, a meal amount of food, but like, I still didn't have anything to say to somebody who's just eating food on a regular basis.Laura: Well, the thing is like, I think this is where you're going anyway, but none of our fucking business, right? It is ultimately, like if you were her, if you were her dietician, you'd probably have some things to say to her, but you're not. And neither am I. Jessica: I'm not, yeah. And my, and it probably even wouldn't, like 10 days of whatever it is that you're doing, it's gonna be like, there's, there's not much that would happen in 10 days that you wouldn't be just very hungry about and need to, you know. Laura: I'm just gonna say if you are in active eating disorder recovery, please do not do this. Like, just to cover our backs, but like for, people who are like, generally fine, it's not gonna do any harm for that length. It's not gonna feel great, but it's not gonna,Jessica: Yeah. I might end up hungry at the end of 10 days is like what I envisioned was gonna happen. But yeah, the people who had big thoughts and big feelings, I could definitely see like them, like they're emotional responses, um, coming from not ever, you know, wanting to see somebody go on a cleanse, but not only anybody go on a cleanse, but Lizzo. Lizzo a fat Black woman who takes up both literal, you know, metaphorical and actual space. Um, who everybody who would, you know, we looked up to Lizzo for her, you know, magical ability to actually love her fat body when you know everybody in America and Western society tells fat Black women that you know, that they should be ashamed of their bodies. Lizzo, was like one person everyone could point to, to feel good about their own bodies, like all of a sudden, yeah. Lizzo became this like body positivity mammy for a lot of people. Something she had never asked for. She is a performer, a musician, a flutist, and she, I assume, did not set out to, you know, have people put things onto her body that she did not ask for. She's not there for anybody but herself. And so by Smoothie Gate, like people are devastated. They, you know, are practicing self-care. They're talking to their therapist about this thing that Lizzo did to them, like it was,Laura: Were taking it as a personal betrayal, weren't,Jessica: Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. posting, like, this is what you can do for self-care during this tough time. And all along, like Lizzo said, nothing about wanting to lose weight. And never did.Laura: And it kind of, it goes back to what we were talking about before around resilience and, and Black women, like people putting everything on Black women that they did not ask to carry. They don't to carry all your trauma responses and, and be your poster child for body positivity whenJessica: Mm-hmm.Laura: you've never claimed that for yourself.Jessica: Right. It really, again, just like you said, is indicative of just something else that goes on, like subconsciously for all of us and the ways that yes, Black women are meant to carry a lot more than just our own body stories and experiences.Laura: And I think it's kind of this like, and this is part of what you're saying in, in the book, and I'm kind of extrapolating a little bit here, but, the, you know, body positivity as it was originally conceived, came out of the fat liberation movement, which was as we are, we all know now, started by fat, Black, Jewish, and queer folks. But it's become this depoliticized movement that has been co-opted and taken over by, as you say in the book, like it could, you know, you've got like, I don't know, shapewear companies using hashtag body positive and like whatever diet companies and yeah, using that moniker. And then just the kind of the, the expectations and the pressures that come with, you know, that, that label that should love yourself, and that there's like, there's this great quote that I think you used for, is it Nicole Byers? That that talks like what, why do we need a name for just existing in our bodies.Jessica: Right. For not hating them.Laura: for not, yeah, yeah.Jessica: Yeah. We don't need to name, yeah, a name for not hating a part. She, I think she says a part of our bodies, because life's already hard. Why do we ? But yeah, that's, she also doesn't identify, yes, as body positive because of that reason.Laura: Yeah.Jessica: Having a name for just not hating yourself seems wild.Laura: Yeah. It, it really is when you stop to think about it in, in those terms. And, and like at the same time, you know, as, as some of the folks that you spoke to through the book, sort of say like, well, it was a gateway to fat liberation. Um, the, the problem is that like 90% of the people, more than that, that engage in body positivity don't go any further. And then becomes this like neoliberal self-improvement project, projectJessica: Yeah. And it that actually, made me think about that. Earlier you said like, wasn't, became less political, but I feel like people think that body politics, like in this, in just body positivity is like political. If you have no politics, like if you're not politically engaged, like this can seem so radical to you, even though it means nothing.It doesn't stand for anything, you know? So it's like, it's like, uh, composting as a politic, but like body from, you know, a politic from body positivity when it doesn't stand for anything. Yes. Neoliberalism and just this like making something out of nothingLaura: Yeah, this individualistic self-care, you know, problem that it's up to you to solve when, like, as we've discussed, the, the roots are social and systemic. The issues are, issues are social and systemic. Yeah.Jessica: But just feel better about your body. That's, that's the goal.Laura: It's all just a big distraction tactic. Though isn't it, likeJessica: Yes. point. Always is.Laura: Always, like it's all of these systems when we, when we strip them to the bare bones, are just to keep us, you know, distracted, to keep us separated, to keep us like out of community with each other. Because if we actually start to talk to each other about these things, we, we will fucking revolt and , um, the ruling class don't want that. So that doesn't serve capitalism we revolt.Jessica: Mm-hmm.Laura: soJessica: keep us anxious, to keep us buying and spending money on whatever the next beauty industrial complex situation has going for us. Yeah. And just spend spending money onLaura: keep us in scarcity. Yeah.Jessica: not doing enough. Don't have enough,Laura: And feeling like the only way out of that is through dominion of other people.Jessica: Mm-hmm.Laura: Okay. On that fun note, Jessica, I would love to know in amongst all of the media circus and just general chaos that is publishing a book, who or what is nourishing you right now?Jessica: I have been enjoying two different podcasts. Vibe Check from three gay Black guys that, you know, talk about what's keeping their vibes right, politics and pop culture. And I really love the banter between them. It's smart, it's sassy. Another by Britney Luce, It's Been a Minute, also an as an NPR podcast. And I don't know what folks thought the show was going to be, but it is 100% black, 100% black women focused, and I love it. And then I would say 2023, I am really hoping to become a better baker. And so I've just been telling people that I am, uh, somebody was planning an event and I said, I'm a baker, uh, what can I bring? You know, I'm just throwing that out there. Mm-hmm. , Laura: Love, I just love this, like fake it till you make it. AndJessica: Exactly. I'm a baker. What can, what can I bring you? And I mean, I'll still bring it, uh, whether or not it'll be edible, beautiful, it's something else entirely. But you know what, I'm a baker. So,Laura: What are you baking specifically? What have you been baking?Jessica: I think my next, uh, baking attempt will be to construct something. I didn't get to do any, like gingerbread construction situations. So I might find like a castle, um, and make one . I know.Laura: I was expecting you to say some like, but you wouldn't know what this is in in the States, but like Victoria sponge cake or like something really basic.Jessica: Do know those. Um, to make it, I like glitter a lot too. Uh, so, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to decorate a castle with glitter.Laura: That's, I want a picture of that one. I'm sure you'll put it on social media, right? Um, I still have Instagram, deleted at the moment. I reinstalled it on my phone yesterday to check a message. Um, and then immediately deleted. I'm not ready for this. I can't do it yet.Um, but yeah. Okay. So baking is keeping you afloat and so are these podcasts. I think the vibe check one, I just came across that the other day because I think Samantha, um, Erby like, name dropped that in the newsletterr the other day. I think. I think it's that one. But, um, okay. So I dunno if I've maybe confused you by asking you that question because at the end of every episode, I always ask what you are snacking on right now, which is your recommendation thing. Did you just tell me your snacks?Jessica: Yes. The things that I wouldLaura: Your recommendations? Yeah. Okay, so back, wait. First of all, I'll tell you my snacks and then I'll ask you what's nourishing you.Jessica: I love this. We just, Laura: We're just flipping, reversing it here. So my snack is a literal snacks that my brother just sent me a huge box of shit from Trader Joe's, which I know is not like exciting to you.Jessica: It’s Trader Joe's!Laura: But we don’t have that here.Jessica: It is a primary point of conversation when I'm over there.Laura: I just, okay. I need to compose myself. Cause I'm very excited about this box of snack of snacks. Like the, he sent me the, the Thai chili lime cashews.Jessica: Mm-hmm. Yes.Laura: There's like some chocolate, coconut, granola. There are like cookies in there. There are, okay, this isn't from Trader Joe's, but there are birthday cake Oreos, which are,Jessica: Yes.Laura: Oh my god.You don't understand. They have here, but they're not the same. And they cost like 10 pounds for a packet. I'm not paying 10 pounds for Oreos. That's ridiculous. Um, but I will get my brother to them all the way from America, um, on his dollars. And, um, what else is in there? Oh, like everything but the bagel seasoning the everything the bagel nuts.The, like, there's so much stuff in there. I'm really, oh, the, there's like, um, peanut butter stuffed pretzels.Jessica: Yep. That was gonna be the next one I asked you about. Mm-hmm.Laura: There's so much cool stuff in there. I'm very excited. So yeah, my thing is Trader Joe's snacksJessica: Absolutely.Laura: that you get your brother to shipJessica: Yeah, if he didn't send you cookie butter, um, highly recommend you put that on the next list.Laura: I think I did ask him for that and I haven't seen it there. So yeah, there's gonna a, a follow up, but yes. Oh my And there are nut bars. They're really good as well, and they're like cheap to everywhere else. Everything at Trader Joe's relatively cheap, so that's, I'm very excited to go and dig into that package. I literally got it right before we started recording, so,Jessica: Oh, that's excellent.Laura: Yeah. And if anyone else wants to send me a care package from the States, anyone inJessica: From Trader Joe's, specificallyLaura: Just like, just go in, do a supermarket sweep and send. Um, okay. So now we will go back and I will ask you who or what is nourishing you right now?Like what is keeping you afloat?Jessica: Hmm. I'm like, how long is this list? It's like, is it the acknowledgements in my book right now? That seems, Hmm. Laura: It can just be like, it can be your spouse or your dogs or like,Jessica: Yeah. Um, I know. I'm like, well, definitely.Laura: Just so many people.Jessica: I know 100% dogs. Um, I will say Amy, who made a meal of tater tots, that's something else that I find is not as popular over on,Laura: We don't have them, but I also had like a bad hangover experience with tater tots. So,Jessica: Okay, a meal of tater tots and other things, um, like layered on top, but also a signature cocktail for me and my book that had, oh, let's see. It was Gin and Prosecco and marionberry and rosemary. It was very sweet. So I would say that specifically in that moment of getting together and like recognizing that this book is, you know, being birthed and is coming out, that was a very special moment.So I will hold onto that one for a bit. Laura: Oh, I love that. Since we're talking about the book, do you wanna share the name and like I will link in the show notes, obviously to where people can get it, but do you wanna share the name of the book and then where people can find out more about you and your work?Jessica: Sure. The title is, It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies. And there is a UK Amazon link for it now. You can find more about the book on my personal website. Jessica Wilson, ms r d um, dot com. Instagram has tons about the book and about washing legs. I'm over at Jessica Wilson msr, um, Instagram and Jessica Wilson Rd on Twitter. But most of the fun, the joy and the silliness is, is over on Instagram.Laura: Thank so much Jessica. We'll put all the links to where to find you and how to get ahold of the book in the UK and the US in the show notes for this episode so people can check it out. And congratulations on birthing a book into the world. It's so exciting and I can't wait for people to get it into their hands.Jessica: Thanks so much, Laura. This was really fun.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. 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HEYO. And welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast! We took a break back in November after wrapping up Season 1 of the pod with Katie Greenall talking all things Embodiment, so check out that episode if you haven’t already. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.We’re kicking off Season 2 with Whitney Trotter - Registered Dietitian and nurse, Anti-racism Educator/Consultant and Human Trafficking Activist. Whitney is also mother to a 6 year old who is a selective eater. In this ‘sode, Whitney and I talk about her daughter’s eating and what this brings up for her as a dietitian and eating disorder professional. Whitney goes on to talk about her work supporting parents with eating disorders who are really struggling in their relationship with food and their body, looking closely at the underlying anxieties that come up around eating and what they can teach us. We talk about what feeding children can bring up for parents who have eating disorders or disordered eating and how that experience can be so triggering.And Whitney talks about how going to the drive thru is 1) not something you should feel bad about and 2) something that can actually bring more connection when you’re feeding a family.Find out more about Whitney here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Here’s the transcript in full:Whitney: You know, I always think anxiety can teach us so much, right? Like, we typically treat anxiety as all bad, but I think it's a root of a lot of things. And so really leaning into, okay, what is the anxiety telling us? You know, are we, is there a fear? Right? So for sometimes, it's the meal that we're cooking. The parent or mom really wants their kid to have variety, but they're so worried about how this particular food is gonna show up for them. There's a lot of myths. There's a lot of lies that their eating disorder has told them about certain foods. And so really processing through that, processing okay, what feels safe to eat? What feels safe to share like community wise with our family. Things like that. And maybe even delegating, you know, what is their partner doing? Can the partner help with the meal times and the plating and the cooking, things like that, will that dial down some of that anxiety?INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to Season Two of Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Whitney Trotter.Whitney is a registered dietician and nurse, anti-racism consultant and human trafficking activist based in Memphis, Tennessee. And as we'll learn, she's also the parent of a six-year-old who is a selective eater. So Whitney and I talk about her daughter's eating, and what this brings up for her as a dietician and an eating disorder professional. It touches on anxiety, fear, and feelings of failure, especially if you've made your whole career about nourishing people.Whitney goes on to talk about her work supporting parents with eating disorders who are really struggling in the relationship with food and their body, looking closely at the underlying anxieties that come up around eating and what they can teach us. We talk about what feeding children can bring up for parents who have eating disorders or disordered eating, and how that experience can be really triggering.We also talk about renourishing our inner child through eating nostalgic kid foods, and I talk a little bit about that article that I published last week on clean eating orthorexia and kids, which I've linked to in the show notes and the transcript, if you haven't already seen that. And we also talk about how mumfluencer culture and diet culture collide to make it seem like feeding kids is about an aesthetic as opposed to being based on something that's achievable or realistic or practical or even functional.And then Whitney talks, uh, about how going to the drive-through is one, not something that you should feel bad about. And two, something that can actually bring more connection when you're feeding a family. Lots of really cool stuff. We kind of go all over the place, but in a good way. And I really enjoy talking to Whitney, she's someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for a long time, so I'm glad that we finally made it work. I just want to give a content warning. We talk about body image in the context of sexual assault and miscarriage. Not in any detail, but I just wanted to mention that it's there. We also talk about eating disorders and our experiences of having babies in the NICU and breastfeeding challenges. So if those are things that you don't need to hear right now, then please skip ahead. There will be another episode out next week. And before we get to today's episode, I just want to share that I am gonna be running my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop again in February. A lot of you have been asking about this. I kind of took a break from running workshops as I was getting my Substack up and going. Um, but now I'm able to kind of offer, I don't know how often I'm gonna do it, but we're gonna have one in February. It will be a 90 minute workshop completely online, and you'll be sent a copy of the recording afterwards to watch back.So you know, if bedtime goes way later than you're expecting, then um, yeah, you'll be able to catch up with it another time. We'll be talking about how kids' embodiment gets disrupted by diet culture, and what this has to do with feeding and how it can affect the feeding relationship. We'll discuss why we need to throw the rule book out the window and let them have ice cream before broccoli, and we'll talk about how we can build trust in our kids to get what they need.I'll offer a framework that can help you feel more relaxed about mealtimes whilst also encouraging kids to have autonomy. We'll talk about how providing supportive structure can encourage children to remain in touch with their internal cues for hunger satisfaction and pleasure and fullness. And I'll cover how fussy eating develops and talk about some developmental milestones with eating as well as tools to help move through it. We'll also talk about why cutting out sugar and saying things like just another bite can undermine kids' instincts around food. And we'll talk about how we can talk about food and bodies without causing harm. So you'll be asked to fill out a short questionnaire about your specific situation ahead of time, and I'll try and tailor the content to the audience as much as possible.You'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters download. The workshop is suitable for grownups of kids of all ages, but I would say it's probably best for kids under 12. Parents, whatever that means to you and your family, grandparents, teachers, nutrition professionals, and anyone else working with kids are all welcome.It will be on Tuesday, the 21st of February, which aptly is pancake day, and it will be at seven o'clock and it's 15 pounds to join and it will be over Zoom. The full details and the booking information is in the show notes and the transcript for this episode. For those of you who are subscribed to the newsletter, you'll get a reminder and a link in an upcoming newsletter as well.And one more thing just before we get to Whitney, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack is a reader supportive publication. I'd love to bring you more deeply research pieces like my piece on clean eating and kids, but it requires a significant investment in my time, plus the support of an editor. So, if you are in a position to become a paid subscriber, then please consider it. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. And if that's not accessible for you right now, you can email [email protected], putting the word snacks in the subject line and we will hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked. Alright, team, here is my conversation with Whitney Trotter.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Whitney, I'd love it if you could share with the audience who or what you are nourishing right now.Whitney: Oh my goodness. Okay. Well I am a mom of a feisty six year old, little girl who I just adore. So, we were kind of talking before the thing about some other dieticians that work in pediatrics and feeding and things like that. So I'm exploring the land of working with the selective eater. So our, yeah, so it's really fun.Like our, nourishing times are a bit chaotic right now and so doing that. I'm also, uh, an avid coffee lover, so I have been trying different just flavours of coffee, different roasters and a non beverage food thing that I've been kind of nourishing my soul with lately is I've been listening to the audiobook of Hood Feminism.I love, love it. So.Laura: Yeah, lots of different things. Tell us about your selective eater a little bit more.Whitney: Oh my goodness, so I think any, any mom, but particularly like dietician, nurse, mom, it's, it's so hard to like really kind of step back from our traditional schooling. So she legitimately has like six foods that she'll eat. Um, Mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, bacon, pancakes, strawberries, peanut butter and jelly. And that is it. So we've been really working with, you know, the autonomy piece, but also like, you know, there's also that just like natural worry of parents of it's like, okay, is my kid getting enough? Like, so many times in like our kind of traditional setting, it's like variety, variety, variety. And so really working on trying to let her be autonomous in the variety.So we've been giving her like, you know, three options to choose from and then she gets to choose out of those, like three to four options, what she's willing to try.Laura: Yeah, it's so, it's so interesting hearing from a parent who is, is, you know, has, I don't wanna say legitimately selective eater, because that makes it seem like other forms are illegitimate. But I suppose what I was thinking about there is how from social media, we get a really distorted picture of what kids should eat.And we see them eating like kale and I don't know, mushrooms and all of these, these foods that are really challenging for little kids. And so then when they go through that like normal or like typical food neophobic stage as toddlers and preschoolers and even into like school age, that parents have this sense that they're this, that they're developing feeding differences.And it's not until you hear of a child who is literally only eating six foods that you realize, wow, okay, actually my kid does have a reasonable variety and balance of food. So how are you, are you like, are you getting professional support with that? Like, and, and also like what does that bring up for you as a dietician, as a nurse?Whitney: Well at first you're like did I fail my kid? What am I doing wrong? I mean, you know, cause I work in and I see, I work in the land of eating disorder, so I treat a lot of children and adolescents and adults with disordered eating and eating disorders. So it is interesting. We do a lot of food neutrality, like we do not moralise food. Food is food. So, and she's, she's a spicy six year old, so she's very quick to, you know, to say the same thing that, that I'm teaching her back to me, which is always funny. So she's on the growth chart, like she's growing and so right now we're just kind of, you know, living in the land of offering the choices and not forcing, and then just making sure she's getting enough of the foods that she will eat throughout the day.So the biggest thing is I just wanna make sure she was growing and nourishing. And she is, and our pediatrician is wonderful.She's also Venezuelan, and so I think it's just a, another just added benefit of she's seen kids in from so many different other cultures and countries. And so she was like, you know what? I'm not worried. I don't want you to be worried. I'm like, okay.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And I like, I suppose it is really reassuring to hear from another healthcare professional like it, you know, everything looks good here. But I can also imagine like, as, as a nutritionist being like, holy shit, my kid is only six. Like, it is, it's so, even though I work with that population, like I know it's like really anxiety provoking when, you know, like kind of in the way that doctors make the worst patients like... Whitney: Yes, it's so true, so true. Cuz I mean, you really do, you're like, okay, what do I do? Like, you know, especially again cuz working in the eating disorders, you know what the outcome could be if you say certain things, if you press too hard. You know what I'm saying? So we're very cognizant of that. But we also just, we are, we really do tend to like, let her choose a lot of things. Like we really are those type of parents that like work with her in bodily autonomy and even when it comes to food, you know, so, it, I would be lying if I said it wasn't challenging, cuz it definitely is challenging. So we're kind of just staying the course right now.Laura: Well, and this is a, this is a, a different thing, but I have a two and a half year old and I've, I've spoken about this, loads on the podcast, but he was in the NICU for like two, only like two weeks, which, actually, I say only two weeks now, but at the time it felt like an eternity. And we had a really, really difficult time getting feeding established, breastfeeding established, and yeah.And, and there was something that felt so like, It, it just like really shook the core of my identity as a nutritionist to not be able to feed my child.Whitney: Yes,Laura: There is something that, that like just touched on, something like really deep, like I've made my entire career about nourishing people, yet I can't nourish my own child and that, I don't know if, if that resonates with you at all in your experience of feeding your daughter. Whitney: This is so wild that you're saying this, and thank you for sharing that. We had the exact same thing. She was in NICU and they gave her a, they gave her the wrong nipple. They, for the bottle, it was like a fast,Laura: A fast flow. Yes. That happened to us too.Whitney: Yeah. So then when she went to latch, I couldn't, she, she couldn't latch.And so similar, you go through this period, like you feel like a failure, you know, like you feel like, like you just said, it's like I, I've spent my whole career trying to help others nourish their body and like, I can't even feed my own child. And so she ended up with a really bad gag reflex, like, just really, really bad when she was younger. We would have to like prop her up to sleep. She was on medication. So I mean, it's been, yeah, even now she will kind of sometimes struggle with that, but yeah, that resonates so deeply. And just the trauma of your baby being in NICU, I mean, so, it's so traumatic for you, you know, as a parent. And so, yeah, definitely. It's so interesting. We have similar, uh, similar stories regarding that.Laura: Well, and then I think this is the, the thing that I've kind of discovered, like through having conversations on this podcast is that it it, because it, it happens to so many of us but we're just kind of expected to power on and keep going and, and not, and you know, just like dust it under, under the rug. And yeah, I think there, I'm thinking particularly of a conversation that I had with Christy Harrison. You know, again, sort of her story parallels a lot of my experience as well. And yeah, just how healing and cathartic it is to be able to, to share this more openly. Yeah, because it's, like I said, I think a lot of it, we, we, a lot of us experience, you know, similar things. I'm also really, you know, you've, you've mentioned a couple of times that you work in the eating disorder field and another theme that we touch on a lot in the, on the podcast is, you know, healing our own relationship with food as a parent and sort of supporting our children to have a positive or a healthy, or, you know, like however you wanna frame it, like a, a good relationship with food and bodies.And I'm, I'm really curious to hear more about your experience of working with parents who have either disordered eating or eating disorders and, and yeah, how you hold them and support them in your work.Whitney: Yeah, it's so interesting because I, I'm thinking of a particular session I had last week with a mom and we were really talking about how, you know, her daughter for the first time noticed that she ate dinner and you know, one of the things I told her, I said, your daughter is never gonna thank you for your restriction, but she is gonna remember the memories that you cultivate with her, particularly around meal times. And you know, I think that was really hard for her to hear and we kind of just sat with that and really explored, you know, what is it like for you to be able to sit at the dinner table with your kids and not every night like I know that's not realistic and you know, but two or three nights a week and engage in conversation.Cuz usually as parents and it's hard, right? Like different seasons of life, sometimes dinnertime is the only time you have to like sit and talk with them. There's after school activities, you know, parents are usually working, somebody's cooking, somebody's cleaning, and then you're exhausted. And so sometimes that like 30, 45 minutes is like the only time the family is together.And I think the eating disorder, you know, really can come in and monopolize that time as well. And it makes it very hard for somebody who is struggling, you know, with nourishment of their body, with body image to be able to sit and really holistically be present and be in the moment. So we definitely talk a lot about that.You know, I think too, you know, kind of speaking more generally with moms, we're, we're used to having to do so much, right? Like some of us are working in home, some of us are working outside of the home. Still taking a lot of the responsibility of maybe driving or navigating, dropping kids off to school or daycare, cooking, like I said, cooking, cleaning, there's so much on us that I think also by the time we finally sit down to eat, we're just so exhausted.Laura: Mm-hmm. If, if you have an eating disorder, even just disordered eating, when you're that exhausted, it's those eating disorder thoughts or those, you know, thoughts about weight and body size becomes so much more pronounced,Whitney: Yes,Laura: and that further takes you away from being connected and being present with your family. And I'm, I'm wondering what you offer your clients who are, yeah, really just struggling even to get through a mealtime with their family. Whitney: Yeah. So usually what we'll do is we'll do meal exposures together or we'll do like a snack, something to where there's not as much pressure of eyes kind of on them, so to speak. You know, so, maybe we'll try breakfast or lunch, we'll do some kind of exposures together, really dialing into what is the anxiety.You know, I think anxiety can teach us so much, right? Like, we typically treat anxiety as all bad, but I think it's, it's a root of a lot of things. And so really leaning into, okay, what is the anxiety telling us? You know, are we, is there a fear? Right? Sometimes, it's the meal that we're cooking. The parent or mom really wants their kid to have variety, but they're so worried about how this particular food is gonna show up for them. There's a lot of myths. There's a lot of lies that their eating disorder has told them about certain foods. And so really processing through that, processing okay, what feels safe to eat? What feels safe to share like community wise with our family. Things like that. And maybe even delegating, you know, what is their partner doing? Can the partner help with the meal times and the plating and the cooking, things like that, will that dial down some of that anxiety?So kind of really processing through all of that and trying to figure out, and also too, you know, I think a lot of us tend to treat the eating disorder from an abstinence-based approach, and that's not necessarily my philosophy. And so always trying to figure out, okay, what is the root of this? You know, what is the eating disorder giving us, you know, what is it telling us?What is it, what is it helping you navigate through? You know? And then are there alternative coping things that we can use?Laura: Yeah. So I think what you're, you're naming there is how oftentimes eating disorders manifest as a sort of byproduct of trauma oftentimes, and how, I mean, a, a major part of the reason that they develop is because they felt safe, like safety, they kept us safe in one way, shape or another. And so it's, it's almost kind of understanding, okay, the ways that, that this was helpful and protective at least initially, but how perhaps, you know now that the, the immediate danger has subsided, clinging onto an eating disorder is actually more harmful and destructive.Whitney: Yes.Laura: So what are the other ways of coping, of managing that are not destructive, that are helpful and, yeah, that allow us to have a, a, a quality of life that you know, an eating disorder just does not afford anyone. Is that fair? Is that-Whitney: Yeah, absolutely.Laura: -a decent summary?Whitney: Beautifully said Laura: And I hear from a lot of parents maybe kind of early on in terms of feeding their kids. So when it comes up to the point that they're introducing solids and like in the UK we call that weening. I know that's a different thing in the US, but at the point that they're introducing solids and how that can for people with an eating disorder can be really a really triggering phase of parenting. And I'm curious to hear if you've come across this with any of your clients or had conversations with folks about this and what your thoughts are.Whitney: It can be so triggering. It can be triggering, you know, there's so much of the body that can be triggering that we don't talk about, right? So if you are pregnant and you lose your baby, you will still lactate. You know, you will, your, your milk will still come in which can be so triggering. Um, I also have a lot of expertise and experience working with sexual assault victims, and so definitely wanna do a, a trigger warning on that.But the breastfeeding can be particularly triggering if there was a traumatic, anything traumatizing to the breast. And so really kind of going through that as well. Body image, you know, our body changes so much. And that postpartum, you know, pregnancy and that postpartum, I like to think of postpartum as a year.And so that postpartum,Laura: I'm two and a half years out and I'm still saying I'm postpartum.Whitney: I, you know, yeah, I, it makes me so mad.Laura: You’re always postpartum, right,Whitney: Yes. Laura: after you've had a baby?Whitney: You are. You are never, yeah, you are never the same, right? You are never the same. I love that. I love that. So I think all of that really needs to be taken into consideration as well. And then the weaning part. So what we, what I've done before in the past is have met with the partners and have really developed a plan for kind of that postpartum in the perinatal phase and, you know, during pregnancy as well.And really have, having the partner be kind of the eyes and ears. And so then it takes, it kind of takes a pressure off because we want our partner also to be involved with the, with the, you know, we call it baby led weaning too, and, and solid sometimes. Different verbiage, but meaning the same thing. So how can we get the partner involved? Sometimes I'll have parents take pictures too of like, okay, like, what do you think? And then also work with the pediatrician as well. I think it's really, really important that we work with a pediatrician just to make sure that baby is, you know, adequately growing.Particularly too, I've always been so curious of this, of, you know, you and I share similar experiences with the, the trauma of NICU and, and latching. But when you have an eating disorder, particularly in such a vulnerable space and time, how does that affect milk supply? How does that affect latching? Different things like that. If there's a co-occurring mood disorder, right? So how is that showing up as well? And so really just trying to hold space for all of the variables while providing, you know, as much support and how the person wants support. I'm also a nurse and so I work with a lot of nurses that have eating disorders and some of them are like, okay, Whitney, give me like, I just need cognitive things. Like, tell me what to do. I need cognitive resources. I always like to ask like, how do you want to receive information, you know, as well.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And, I think like one thing that I just wanna point out that I've heard from, from parents with eating disorders as well, is that actually sometimes seeing your child have this like real innate embodied wisdom around food and knowing exactly what to do can be so healing for a parent with an eating disorder as well. Like that can really be like, wow, here's this almost role model in a sense of how to have an intuitive relationship with food.Whitney: Yes. And it's almost like reparenting, they get a chance of kind of like to reparent or, or sometimes I like to, maybe not reparent is the best word, but like renourish their inner child. Like they get to reclaim some of that as they're going through the process of, you know, watching the baby-led weaning.And so I try to do things to like make it fun. I, and you know, some parents will side-eye me, but like, also like if your kid is doing chicken nuggets and peas and, mac and cheese, eat chicken nuggets, peas and mac and cheese with them, you know, eat some of those kid foods that maybe.Laura: Oh my God. This is not like, if any parent listening in on this podcast side eyed you for that, then I would put them out personally, because we don't judge or shame food around here. But yeah. Sorry. Your point still stands though. Like get, get in there with them.Whitney: Yes. Make food messy. Make it fun. I've had so many parents be like, oh my goodness, you want me to do what? I'm like, yes, eat those things that you did not necessarily get to eat as a child. You know, because maybe, cuz sometimes too, you gotta think we're, we're dealing generational, right? There was the grandmother that had the eating disorder or the grandfather, which, or a close family member, which directly impacted how the parent, their relationship with food and body and that parent is like, okay, I really wanna break this generational cycle of disordered eating, eating disorder, and some of that is, it gets renourishing, the younger our, our younger inner child too.Laura: Yeah. And that’s like a question that I was gonna ask you, you know, for parents who have their own eating disorder, who really are terrified of passing that onto their own kids. You've sort of named there that eating those fun, nostalgic childhood foods is something that they can do to help, like you say, end that intergenerational cycle of dieting, disordered eating, eating disorders. But I'm wondering if there's anything else that you would offer to parents to help, you know, put their mind at ease in terms of, you know, passing on an eating disorder.Whitney: Yeah, you know, we know that there is a genetic vulnerability. It's, you know, we can actually in the bio psychosocial model, like the biology, the psychology, the social environment, and I think the social environment really is key, right? Is how are we creating these safe spaces for you and family members when it comes to eating? And I think too, like taking the pressure off of eating, you know, food is so many different things. It's cultural, it's celebratory you know, it can be, you know, different religions have different food, uh, preferences and things as well. But we can also make it fun. And that's the thing too, is like, I don't think a lot of kids and adolescents are like wanting parents to cook these gourmet meals and make sure they have the salmon, twiced baked potatoes, right? Like, I couldn't, I, I remember some of those things I grew up eating right, but I don't remember every mealtime. But I do remember the, like how I felt as a kid getting to be in that space with my parents. So that's what I tell the parents that I'm working with is how do we create just that safe space where you get to just be with your kid for those 20, 30 minutes. Right? Especially the teenagers, right. I have a lot of parents that are parenting teenagers and it's like just, you know, such a chaotic time. Right?Laura: Yeah.Whitney: So I'm like, go through the drive through. Go through the drive through, turn off the radio, and y'all talk, you know, maybe have 20 minutes a day where there's no stimulation, if you can and just talk and, and see how they're doing. That's the kind of stuff that they remember, you know.Laura: I, yeah. I love that so much. You know, my next question was going to be about sort of the influence of social media in terms of like our, in influencing us to feed our kids perfectly. And as you were saying that, like, I wish that you turned that into like a post for social media. Like take your kids to the fucking drive-through , just go.Whitney: Just go through the drive through. It amazes me, like, yeah, it amazes me. Just like you said, I'm gonna make that a post. That's a great idea. Laura: Do it. Please do it. Because like not only is it subversive in and of itself, but like coming from a dietician who works in eating disorders, like, just like we need that, I'm, I'm working on a piece at the moment, for my newsletter about clean eating and orthorexia and how that is then transmitted to kids and like the fallout on children like, Whitney, I found a case study of a six month old baby. I'm actually gonna cry. A six month old baby who was being fed a homemade formula of sea moss and hemp seed, no supplementation. This child had hypocalcemia, was admitted to hospital with seizures and had rickets. A six month old baby in like, this is like a couple of years ago, right. And so this, yeah, I'm, I guess, You know, we, we all want our kids to be well-nourished, like you were saying at the beginning. Right. That's like, that's a, that's like a, it's a fundamental job of a parent, right? To make sure your kid has like enough to eat and like gets all their, all their nutrition and at the same time, all the, like the fearmongering, the scaremongering around nutrition, around, you know, the quote unquote obesity epidemic. It’s driving parents to, and I'm not blaming any individual parent here cuz it's a systemic issue, but it's, you know, promoting a way of eating that is so dangerous for children.Whitney: Yeah.Laura: Anyway, sorry, that was like a major tangent because I've been thinking about it and I find it so disturbing and upsetting. But even in my own practice, I see it happen on like a, not such an acute level, but see the fallout of kind of like this of like healthy eating and clean eating and yeah, this strive for perfection in feeding our kids.Whitney: Yes. And well, and you bring up such a good point too, is I've actually had the parent, the mom, and the, and again, kind of speaking more generally, the mom ended up realizing she had a problem because the kid's teacher was like, you're not packing enough food.Laura: Okay. Yeah.Whitney: So that's when she was like, my relationship, I'm passing on these traits and behaviors. Like I'm, I'm, I'm so, my relationship with food is so distorted that now I'm not even packing enough for my kid. And so even teachers just really, you know, and I'm so grateful. My daughter's kindergarten teacher actually has a son who is in recovery. And so she is so aligned with positive reinforcement. I mean, and like, you know, I told at the beginning, we pack the same lunch. My kid has had the same exact school lunch for three years. I mean, that's, you know, and so I, I just had an honest conversation with her. I was like, you're gonna see the same thing. You know, I, I would love it if she would eat through the line, if she sees something, if she ends up having two lunches, I please support her in that. I want her, you know, we give her free room to try the school lunch if she wants, but we always pack her lunch on field trips. And so, but even teachers, right? Teachers and educators, if we can get them really plugged in on some of these things because you're right, it's, you know, early childhood is such an important time for kids. But it can be so anxiety provoking for parents who are really struggling and are trying to figure out, how do I live with this and it's taking over my life and I don't pass it on.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, it just, I have all the compassion in the world for parents who are in recovery from an eating disorder and, and then having to navigate that layer of feeding their kid. I think it's difficult enough feeding a child with the pressures and expectations that we get from social media anyway without having that layer of, of an eating disorder as well.It's so tricky and like you were sort of suggesting before, there are so many pressure points in terms of conception, pregnancy, baby loss. Infertility is another one. And then the actual, you know, birth and if, if, if it's a traumatic birth in that early postnatal period, and then you go from all of that to then having to, to, to, you know, pick up the reins with baby led weaning or, or whatever else, you know, whatever approach that you're taking. And it just all can be so tricky.Whitney: Yes.Laura: And there's just, there, I feel like there's a lack of anyone having conversations about these things and even less support for these things.Whitney: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Laura: I'm just wondering if, if there's anything that you wanted to add about either navigating feeding kids with an eating disorder or kind of the influence of diet culture, and you know what the like mom influencer culture for want of better word on how we feed our kids and kind of what you are seeing in your clinical practice.Whitney: Yeah. Well you brought up a really good point earlier. We're seeing a lot in the land of orthorexia and so, you know, something I've said before in the past of, uh, clients that I'm like, okay, we, we want to really work on the embodiment. We really wanna work on the variety if we can. The consistent nourishment, you know, without. without engaging orthorexia if we can. And what I mean by that is sometimes there's a tendency, I, I very much treat eating disorders on the spectrum. And so what tends to happen is maybe one, maybe one behavior dials down, but then there's this intense fear anxiety that ramps up and then kind of that obsession with the clean eating, or I don't wanna have like, you know, another co-occurring disease with this. And it's like that hyper fixation emerges. And so really talking about that in a very, just like, non-chain based way. But I definitely see the influence, like you said. I love, I love what you said, the mom culture of this like clean eating smoothie, like whole foods kind of like obsession, which feels so elitist to me. It feels very elitist. Laura: It is because, I mean, this is something I think a lot about is the not only the time, the money, the energy, I don't know. There's so much additional labor that goes into producing that, but it's all hidden, right? Nobody talks about the fact that like, you need someone else to look after your kids while you're doing this right, or you know, the, the labor, like where does that labor fall? Who does that fall on, that labor? And the fact that like it's, you know, it's not necessary from a nutrition perspective, right? You could get like a yogurt drink or a store bought smoothie if that's, you know, available to you. That a lot of what we see on social media is really about aesthetics rather than about nutrition. And I don't know if you know, is it, is it Casey, is it Davis from, from Struggle Care? I don't know if you know that account on social media. I think I've, I've spoken about this before. But she, so she talks about this in terms of your home and, like what's functional versus what is kind of like an aesthetic in terms of your home. And she talks about it through like, through the lens of like laundry. A lot of the times, you know how people have these like pristine laundry rooms and like laundry is kind of a hobby for some people, but that's not necessary in order to have like clean clothes that don't stink, right? You don't like, what is an essential function is like sorting your laundry, putting it in the machine and then like putting it away or putting it in a pile that is, you know, accessible to you. Right. And it's the same thing with feeding, right? This like, I don't even know what the cool, like, super foods are right now, but like the berry nourishing whole foods smoothie.Whitney: Yes,Laura: Like, sure. Give your kids, like, my kid loves berries. My kid would like eat their entire body weight in berries, but I'm not like making a fresh smoothie every morning for him, I'm like throwing some on a tray and being like, here you go.Whitney: Yes, and it's ending up on the wall, on the floor. The fingers are blue. AbsolutelyLaura: So, yeah, and, and I think that that's like a really helpful way to, for us to frame things that we see on social media, like, is this, is this, uh, is this functional or is this an aesthetic? Right. More, more, more often than not on social media, it's an aesthetic, it's a hobby. It's not like a fundamental requirement for feeding our children.Whitney: That's so good. Gosh, I love, okay, it's called struggling. What's the account called? Laura: Struggle Care. Whitney: Struggle Care. That is the most beautiful like metaphor that I have heard in such a while. Like that is,Laura: It's so good. And she did a podcast with you know, like that 10% Happier podcast?Whitney: Yes. Yes.Laura: And she said in that, that she was inspired by like the anti-diet movement to talk about this. She's a therapist. But she kind of took like a lot of the teachings of like the anti diet, like body and body autonomy, and movements like that, and kind of like translated it into home care. So it makes a lot of sense because there are a lot of parallels in terms of like giving yourself permission for your house to be messy. Because what matters is that it's functional and it works for you. Similarly, like eating in a way that works for you rather than all these prescribed rules that diet culture teaches us. I mean, she articulates it a bit better than that, but like, yeah, that's her kind of general,Whitney: I love that so much. I feel like this podcast time was like for me today because I love this so much.Laura: Yeah, she's got, she's got a book. I haven't read it, but I need to get, I need to get on that because yeah, it's clearly she's got a lot of wisdom to share that I think like yeah, we can take for our, you know, to talk about yeah, to, in, in terms of how we can like give ourselves permission to feed our kids in a way that is functional rather than adhering to someone else's unrealistic standards and ideals, which is more about aesthetics than it is about nutrition. Okay.So I'm, I'm curious to know if there's anything else that you wanted to add to that, or if you feel like we've, likeWhitney: I feel like we've talked so about so many things. I love it. I feel like, yeah, so many things today, so far.Laura: Well, given that we have covered a lot of ground, there are, so there are two things that I ask at the end of every episode, and the first thing is that I would love to hear who or what is nourishing you right now.Whitney: Gosh, that's such a good question. So my partner is fabulous and just cannot speak the like enough amazing things. So my partner has been so amazing. Does a lot of the early morning routine , I'm notLaura: Love to see it.Whitney: Yes, I was a night shift nurse for years, and so I, just mornings are still hard for me, so definitely my partner has, has stepped up and I've been getting a lot of nourishment just from a lot of colleagues, you know. I just came back from New York. We were at A Project Heal which is an eating disorder nonprofit in New York City. And so it just felt so nice to be in space with people, you know, I just had really been craving that likeminded people, and so that was just so, just refreshing, like just for my soul, just to be, you know, so many people that I had met honestly over Instagram, right? Like most of the people there I had met and connected with over Instagram. So it was just so nice just to like be in space with them for the first time. So I loved that.Laura: Yeah. Especially like, I don't know how you feel, but if it just feels like, we're still sort of almost in this lockdown mentality of like not really being physically together a lot of times. And a lot of stuff is still like professional stuff is still online, which is great because it makes it really accessible, but at the same time you still miss out on that connection.So yeah. I was watch, I saw some of your stories and posts and stuff from New York and I was like, oh, you looked like you were having the best time.Whitney: It was so fun.Laura: And New York is such a fun city to be in. So yeah, it was like coming across for sure.Whitney: Yeah, I told my, I was telling my husband, I was like, I really wanna go back and take our little one when she's a little older, cuz it's so magical this time of year. And I didn't know that. Like I just, I, you know, I've never been to New York City like, you know, in holiday season and so it is just, it was so, it was cold, but it,Laura: I was just about to say, that's my like memory of New York in like November, December is it's fucking freezingWhitney: It is. It is.Laura: But also spectacular, so yeah. Yeah. Oh, well thank you for sharing that. And then the last, the last question that I have for you is what are you snacking on right now? So, at the end of every episode, my guests and I share something that they've been really into, something that they've been enjoying. Basically a recommendation that you have for the listeners.Whitney: Okay. So I am one of these people that I like to try seasonal things, so I've been trying a lot of mocktails. And we love donuts in our house. So I'm, I, yeah, I, we like love, like, donuts, coffee, chocolate milk, all the things. So I've been trying to do coffee mocktails with like a pastry each morning because it's kind of chilly here, but I just love warmth, just warm things. So that's what I've been doing a lot lately.Laura: So when you're saying a, like a coffee mocktail, is it warm or is it like a, oh, my. Okay. I feel like you need to give a bit more explanation here because like when you said mocktail, I thought you meant like, like an espresso martini, but,Whitney: Yes. So you could do that without the, which. Okay, so how I am, I could drink an espresso martini every day or Bailey's and so I love like a Bailey's Peppermint or like a Bailey liqueor but obviously, you know, at, uh, Laura: It's not, not totally advisable, right?Whitney: I've been doing the hot coffee and I've been exploring with like doing like, so this one dessert that I love to make is, it's cool whip, but I put, uh, okay, so I make, I melt chocolate chips and white chocolate, and then cocoa powder, whip that, let it cool. And then I fold that into like, cool whip or icing, let it freeze. So I'll put that in my hot coffee, let it melt, and then I'll do like a peppermint or a lavender, like simple, like a, a simple syrup thing.Laura: Oh wow.Whitney: And then I'll decorate that with like, and then I'll put more like, whipped cream on top, and I'll decorate that with like, uh, cinnamon or nutmeg or like pecan sprinkle, something like that.Laura: You are doing this for breakfast, like on a weekday.Whitney: Yeah. Yeah.Laura: Oh my God. I can like barely get some oatmeal on the table. That's impressive.Whitney: Yeah, just so I'm, I just finished my semester, so the school year is just so hectic for us because I'm in clinic, I'm getting my, I'm finishing my degree to be a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and so I usually was in clinic like 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM Tuesday, Wednesday, Laura: Uh,Whitney: So I just finished last week. I was in New York taking exams and so I had three weeks off. So I'm just gonna enjoy and do this.Laura: Okay. So your, yeah. Okay. This is a hobby for you. Then, you've got a little bit of extra time. It's luxurious. You're leaning into the seasonal mocktail drink situation. It sounds amazing. I would love to be at your house for breakfast,Whitney: Gosh. I wish I could make you one. I wish I could make you,Laura: I will take a recipe for one. If you have one to share. I will put it in the links.Whitney: Okay. Okay. I'll have to send you some recipes. So I love drinks, like I love beverages, it's so funny you said the word luxury. I made a mood board. Do you know, like Delina Soto, Nutrition Tea? Okay. So we're all like close friends, all met from Instagram, and we have this like nutrition chat. And so Clara was like, let's do a mood board. And so we all zoomed one night with our beverages and Canva. And did these like online mood boards, which were like, amazing. But like my word was luxury. And I was like, I'm really embracing that end of 2022, 2023,Laura: I love it. I love it. Channeling it for the new year. Clara was on Season One of the podcast, so yes. Yay. Yeah. She is known to us. Yeah, she's great. And yeah, I totally love that luxurious energy that you're bringing into 2023. All right, so real quick, my thing that I've been snacking on, so there is this like little brand in the UK I think it's like an independent female owned clothing brand. And they used to do a lot of kid stuff, but now they're doing grownup stuff, but it's still super cute and funky. And I just bought - I've linked to it in a newsletter, but I'll link to it again in this episode - just like a plain t-shirt, but it's got a cereal box, like a little drawing on the front and it's super cute. I just put it in my stories so you can go check that out afterwards. Whitney: Definitely will. Laura: But yeah, it's by Cub & Pudding and just like the cotton is super soft and it's like, you know, just like comfy on my body. I have no idea how I'm gonna wear it yet, but we're recording this before Christmas, even though it will come out afterwards. And yeah, it was like a little Christmas treat to myself. Whitney: I love that. Laura: And it just like is very on brand for me, so loving it. Whitney, it was such a pleasure to chat to you. And I wondered if you could please share where people can find you and, and hear more about your work.Whitney: Yes. Thank you so much for offering that. So my website is www.whitneytrotter.com. And then my Instagram, which I'm probably most accessible through is @whitneytrotter.rd.Laura: And I'll link to all of that in the show notes so people can find you. But this was such a lovely conversation. So thanks for being here. And yeah, everyone go and check Whitney out.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

CIHAS pod is on a season break until the new year. But I promised you some fun bonus pods in the meantime, so here goes. Some juicy, unreleased content right here! Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This week, we’re jumping back to my conversation with the fabulous Virgie Tovar from episode 8 (if you haven’t listened to that ‘sode yet, now’s your chance). This snippet didn’t appear in the OG episode, but Virgie shares some really helpful tips on her approach to how to respond to a kid who asks ‘am I fat?’. Virgie sets out seven steps you can take to help you handle this question in an age-appropriate way, and considers things like what if you don’t feel OK about your body, and how you can help the kiddo if they are being bullied about their weight. Spoiler - I might have convinced Virgie to join the ‘Stack. And she might have agreed to write a very cool, fat Christmas love story to share on CIHAS in December 👀 👀Find out more about Virgie here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Here’s the transcript in full.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to a special bonus episode of Can I Have Another Snack? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter, so regular listeners will know that we are currently on a season break, and we'll be back with full episodes in January.I did promise you all a few bonus tidbits from guests that appeared in season one. So today I'm sharing a snippet of conversation with Virgie Tovar who appeared in episode eight of the podcast. Go back and check out the full conversation if you haven't already. It was a really great episode. This snippet didn't appear in the original episode.It's unreleased content where Virgie sets out her approach to how to respond to a kid who asks, am I fat? This is a question that I get asked so often that I wanted to create a dedicated resource that people could access without having to listen to a full hour long episode. It's also something that you might want to share with a co-parent, a spouse, or a partner, or even a grandparent, to help them navigate these conversations too.Virgie sets out seven steps that you can take to help you handle this question in an age appropriate way. And she also considers things like, what if you don't feel okay about your body and how can you help the kiddo if they're being bullied about their weight? So we're gonna get to Virgie in just a second, but first a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? podcast and newsletter are entirely listener and reader-supported. That means I depend on community, meaning you listening right now to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, and you get access to our exclusive community only threads on a Thursday, the full back archive of essays and posts and dear Laura columns where I answer your questions and some bonus audio content, as well as the free posts that go out to everyone. If you value what we do here, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber and helping make this work sustainable. You can also gift a subscription to a friend this holiday season, and we have included a gift certificate for you to print out or email to your friend who is anti-diet curious, or your mom who kind of gets it, but could do with some extra help, or your partner who absolutely does not get it and needs a kick up the ass.So you'll find that linked in the show notes for this episode, at laurathomas.substack.com, and if for any reason you can't pay for a subscription right now, but you would find it helpful to have access to this content, then please email [email protected] with snacks in the subject line and we'll hook you up, no questions asked.And thank you so much to those of you who are already paid subscribers who are helping to make this work sustainable. I really, really appreciate you backing me. All right. Let's get to my chat with Virgie where she is helping us navigate the question of how to respond to a kid who asks, am I fat?MAIN EPISODELaura: So Virgie, something that you published on your newsletter recently that I really loved and would love to hear you maybe like talk us through it, because I thought it was such a helpful guide, was how to respond when a child asks, I guess their parent, or like it could be a spare-ent or a, you know, a family friend who, whomever you are in that child's life, what if they come to you with a question of, am I fat? And kind of thinking about our broader conversation of, of kind of respectful parenting and, and raising kids, you know, free from diet culture, free from body shame, how would you go about responding to that question?Virgie: Yeah, I mean, I kind of walkthrough in the article seven steps, like step one. I really love that because it really helps people kind of visualise like what's happening. Right. I think, I think, you know, to begin with, before we even get into sort of the steps, the most important thing to understand is your job is fairly simple, right? Like the logistics of getting the job done, I'm gonna get into, but your job, if I can sum it up, is to basically, your whole goal is to convey that fat phobia is wrong. And so, you know, I think this is, there's sort of like a meta, like before we even kind of, right, like there's obviously the question, am I fat? It begs a response of yes or no. It begs a binary. But what I'm arguing is that we need to, when, when our, when a kid approaches us with that question, we need to actually be, you know, the adult in that moment by saying basically that this question is not the important question. The important question is, is seeing people through the lens of good body, bad body, is that something that we believe in? And the answer is no. So, you know, your job is simple basically to, to protect fat kids from fat phobia and from stigma and to teach kids of all sizes that fat phobia is wrong. And so just to kind of go through the steps really quickly,First, recognise that changing narratives is really difficult. So in general, right, like you're being thrown a ball that is very, very complicated and fraught, and your job is to kind of hold, you know, your instinct is gonna be to throw the ball back as quickly as possible because it's uncomfortable. But what's important is to kind of have that moment where you're holding the ball and you're like, Okay, this is complicated. I'm feeling maybe afraid, maybe angry, maybe confused, but it's okay. Just have those feelings. You can responsibly navigate this conversation, even if you're still unresolved about your own body, you know? So I think, I think like to use a counterexample of something that's a little bit more culturally established, right? Like, you know, if a kid was asking you, um, if they're part of a marginalised group or not, with the understanding that that marginalised group is considered bad, Basically, how would you navigate it in, in another situation, right? Like if it was around race, if it was around class, if it was around ability or sexual orientation, right? Like, like think about, think about it in the context of that.The second thing in the steps is don't reflexively say no. Um, this is kind of like where the issue gets, This is typically when this conversation can really get off the rails. So like, again, take the time to have the reaction. It's okay if you're thinking about it, it's okay if you need a minute to talk about it, that's totally normal. But I think the most important thing is a lot of our instincts because of how much fat-phobia there is in the culture, it's to reflexively say no. And in that no, we are saying no, nothing is wrong with you. Right? But, again, this, this likeLaura: the idea that fat is bad.Virgie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So don't reflexively say no, and I, and I kind of, you know, in this part of the article I talk about how when I was a kid, my mother would sort of vacillate between telling me that my body was fine, whatever size it was, and telling me that I wasn't fat, which confirmed in my mind that being fat was a negative.Laura: Mm-hmm.Virgie: And then the third thing in the steps is ask questions like, why do you ask, or what does that word mean to you? I think that like not only does this open up inquiry, it also is giving you information about whether or not your child is being bullied or they're witnessing emotional abuse. I don't love the word bullying, so I think that it just really doesn't get to the scale and the, and the impact of like what childhood emotional abuse happens, even between peers.Um, but anyway. You can get information about whether or not your child is being targeted or this child is like experiencing or witnessing something that is bad for them. And I think also it can kind of get into their worldview, like, what is their context for this? So for example, the example I use in the articles, like, maybe a teenager is asking you this, and in fact you're all, you're really worried that this teenager is being bullied or whatever. But in fact, they maybe saw that word online. They saw fat activism on the, so on social media, and they're just really curious about it and whether or not they can identify with that word. And that's a whole other conversations. I think there is kind of like stay in the information gathering phase of this, of this conversation maybe longer than you, than you might sort of think you would be for, for a seemingly simple question.The fourth step is,Laura: Oh, can, can we, can we pause for a second? Sorry, Virgie. I wanna ask you, because there's something that's so important, I think, in kind of what you said in between steps three and four, in between steps three and four, you mentioned a couple of like just hard truths for grownups to kind of stick to when they're having these conversations and I think they're so helpful. So I'm just, I'm maybe just gonna run through them real quick if that's okay. So you say you don't need to be a medical professional or expert in this topic to share important talking points. Fat phobia is wrong. People who fat shame other people are doing something wrong, even if no one else says it's wrong. The second thing, fat bodies are a part of a normal and beautiful spectrum of body diversity. Three, it's unhealthy for a person to try and have a body that they don't have naturally. Lots of people become ill because they're trying to be thin. The next one, my love and acceptance are not conditional on your weight or size. A good friend's love and acceptance should not be conditional on your weight or size. And the last one, you have the right to stand up for your body and for fat bodies, even if no one else does. And I think even, you know, I think they're so helpful because even if you get lost in whatever, you know, other bits of the conversation, coming back to those like anchor points feels really, really important. So I just wanted to mention them and also I'll link to this, um, article in the show notes so that people can like, you know, refer back to it. So anyway, sorry to derail you there for a second, but I just, I thought that that was a really important point. Um, so yeah, we were up to number four.Virgie: Yeah, I mean those talking points, I mean honestly, right? Like I totally, I think a lot of people feel like. Ill equipped to deal with conversations like this, and I'm just like, I mean, literally, even if all you do is repeat those talking points, um, it's enough.Laura: Cuz so many people, people who are coming from the anti diet, you know, like if they've been in the anti diet space for a while, like they know that, oh no, human diversity is like just a fact of life. And all bodies are good bodies and deserve respect. You know, like just coming back to those like, you know, the, the most simplest distillation of like anti diet work. Like, just come back to those.Virgie: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, going back to a counter example, I think like a lot of, you know, like I think a lot of people are sort of really eager, people who are sort of against, or not on the side of this conversation are really eager to throw around kind of basically the only data point that the medical establishment has, which is sort of, you know, from our research, you know, this belief that people in larger bodies just live lower quality or shorter lives. And I think what's useful to understand is like a counterpoint that's useful to know is in general, white people live longer than black people. So I mean, and, and we would never consider, you know, go like basically saying like, you probably should try to be a white person so that you can live longer and have better health outcomes, We would say, right like, Huh, that is a health disparity statistic. What's that about? Right? And when we kind of come down to it, a lot of it has to do with basically the ongoing experience of, of discrimination, right? But, but at the end of the day, right, like there's all kinds of differentiating health outcomes typically between majority group and targeted group. And it's, it's really only in this domain of, of fat phobia and weight where we really are asking the group that is experiencing abuse to acquiesce and assimilate to the bigotry rather than asking the group who is perpetuating the bigotry to change their behaviour. So I think it's like, really it's, it's just, anyway, it's like there's a lot there, but I just kind of think like, there's a lot to be said for, This is wrong. It's just wrong. Like, is it, it's immoral and we don't have to go past that point. There's not an argument after like it's, it's, it's dehumanising and immoral. Yeah, but you know, what about this statistic? I'm like, well, but it's just, I mean, there's no, you don't, there's no conversation after this is dehumanising and immoral. Um, do you know what I, like it, Like we could also optimise our health by like literally, you know, like the government distributing whatever, right? Like, and, and we probably could recognise that would be weird. Um, So all that to say like, I mean, I don't wanna get too in the weeds cause I'll just get, I'll just like start, start like saying things for hours. But all that to say like, you know, I think really just the, the key, the point is this is wrong, this is immoral and it's dehumanising. And that's kind of the end of the conversation, right? And for someone who's, Yeah butting, just knowing like, hey dude, like if you're not down with human rights and things being moral, like there's nothing else for us to talk about. We're probably not on the same page on a lot of things.Laura: Yeah. Yeah, that's like, that's really as far as the conversation needs to go, but yes. Go. Um, we were on Number four I think.Virgie: Number four. So talk about body shame and weight stigma in an age appropriate way. Right? This is just basically about kind of conveying what the talking points are saying, right? That like basically human diversity is a real thing. It's immoral to judge people or treat them badly based on their body size, period. And then, you know, depending on the age of the kid, you know, a teenager, you would have a slightly perhaps more sophisticated and detailed version of explaining that. And for a kid, you know, you can use reference points that are, um, relevant to, to them and age appropriate for them.So the fifth thing is don't be afraid to be fat positive. I think, you know, I wanna say that specifically, right, if your child is naturally in a larger body, right? Like, and what, and what does it mean to be naturally in a larger body, essentially, whatever body size you have when you are not doing anything, when you're not manipulating anything, that is your natural body size.So if you have a naturally larger body child, it's okay to not just convey neutrality right, I mean, obviously it's kind of, it's up, it's up to you to make this call, but I think, you know, one thing that was never in my life was that sense of like, yeah, and being fat is okay, being fat is rad actually. Right? And this is like, I mean for me, like everyone in my family, going back to my great grandparents was in a fat body. And I kind of wish that, like my parents had sat me down and been like, This is your great grandfather. You have the same body as he does. This is your great grandmother. You have the same, like, what an incredible legacy that we've had as, as a family. You know? Like that would've been so cool to have.The sixth thing on the list is a firm unconditional worth regardless of body size. Again, I accept you no matter what your body size and people who love you and respect you will do the same.And then seventh, practice how they might want to address fat shaming if it happens at school or elsewhere and follow up on step three. So if there is, if you discern in the conversation that they're experiencing emotional abuse or they're witnessing it, this might be a time to follow up on that, but you can help them literally, like creating a script. You all can work on it together, but, you can offer the open-ended question, "Considering that fat shaming is wrong, what do you wanna say to someone who is fat shaming you or another person?" And you can kind of work through scenarios like, kids are really good with imagination. Kids are really good with fictional, you know, working through fictional examples.And, I kind of wanna say also, and this was not in the art- or maybe actually it was in the end, but like it's totally normal that the kid is gonna rebut you, right? They're like, Yeah, but no, but, but, right? What they're trying to do is they're trying to recalibrate what they're learning at school, which is basically, or wherever they're learning in society, um, outside of the home. So they're trying to align their authority figure, which is their peers with you, who's another, another authority figure who are giving them potentially conflicting messages. So what's important is don't see the rebutting as a sense that you have to double down and explain more and explain better and have research. It's not necessarily an invitation to do that. It's simply a, a way in which they're already play acting. Like if I hear this and they're like, Yeah, but, right? It's like, it's you, you have an important opportunity to basically double down and like not deter from your talking points, even as you're getting sort of an onslaught of rebuttals. So it, just stay calm and just sort of expect rebuttal and be like, Yeah, well, so these talking points, we're gonna go right back here. You can ask me as many questions as you want. We're gonna go right back to this is immoral and dehumanizing, and body diversity is natural. So like, you're not getting anything else from me. You could ask me a hundred times. You can ask me a thousand times. And this is great modelling for them. So, um, that's, that's kind of like the, the walkthrough of that.Laura: Yeah. I love that you talked about the conflict that kids can experience, like between what they're hearing from peers and maybe even teachers and these other people outside of the home versus that message that you are, that you're sending and you're really standing your ground and saying like, No, this, this is what I believe in.And, and I think that there's something, you know, opinions kind of out there, as it were, are gonna waiver and change, but if you have kind of courage in your convictions, there's something like very deeply reassuring about that. I think especially for younger children. And then, you know, for older kids then, you know, they're, they're free, all kids are free to make up their, their minds about things. But if they have it modelled that you are like steadfast in that conviction, then I think they're, you know, they're really gonna hopefully reflect on that and kind of take that message on board versus if you're just like, wavering all over the place.Virgie: Yes, absolutely a hundred percent.OUTROSo that was my conversation with Virgie Tovar. To learn more about Virgie, to get the transcript of this conversation or to sign up for the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter head to laurathomas.substack.com. And if you've enjoyed this conversation or other conversations that we've had in season one, then please rate and review in iTunes and please share these episodes with your friends.Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure these episodes get out on time.Keep your eyes peeled for another bonus podcast with Katie Greenall all about appetite and navigating a complicated relationship with food. It's a really, really interesting conversation, and this time it will be just for subscribers. So that's coming up in a couple of weeks. Make sure you're subscribed to get that when it lands.Talk to you all then. Bye. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe