Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Stop Obsessing Over Your Body and Eat Sanely in a Toxic Culture | Virginia Sole-Smith

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

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

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay kids, we've got a provocative one for you today, but provocative and what I really think is going to be a deeply useful and maybe even for some of you life-changing way. Around the new year, a lot of us make resolutions that have to do with our bodies. We're going to eat a certain way, exercise a certain way, etc. But have you ever looked at what exactly is motivating these kinds of resolutions? Are you maybe trying to keep up with some sort of cultural standard that has little, if anything, to do with your actual underlying health? Could it maybe be a case of what has been called the subtle aggression of self-improvement? Virginia SoulSmith has had quite an evolution on these subjects. She used to write for women's magazines and was, therefore,

in the belly of the beast when it comes to diet culture. She now takes a much more subversive and radical tack. She is the author of a book called The Eating Instinct Food, Culture, Body Image, and Gilt in America. And she also writes a very popular newsletter called Burnt Toast. In the first part of this interview, we talk big picture stuff about anti-fat bias, where it comes from, et cetera. And you're going to hear me ask some skeptical questions about her current world view, which she handles well

with answers that are quite well reported. After about 20 minutes of laying some groundwork, we then turn to much more practical and strategic issues. We talk about how, yes, health and body size are connected, but not in the ways you might think. The severe limitations of many of the most popular approaches to weight loss, nuanced strategies for disentangling your mind

from diet culture, how to exercise without a hidden agenda of trying to wrench your body into a certain shape, the idea that food does not have a moral value, the relationship between men exercise and food and diet culture, how our kids get caught up in all of this and what parents can do, what her smartest critic would say about her contentions and her take on ozemic. Just to say,

this is part two of our latest iteration of an occasional series that we do called Get Fit Sainly. If you missed it on Monday, we talked to Dr. Judd Brewer about the science of eating and how to use mindfulness to cut down on overeating or eating when you're not hungry. And coming up on Friday, we're gonna talk to the writer Glenn Endoyle, who's been rethinking her relationship to her body and her intuition after a resurgence of anorexia. Virginia Sol Smith coming up.

But first, a little BSP, blatant self-promotion. Wanna mention two things. First, over on the 10% happier app, we have our New Year's Meditation Challenge. It's called the Imperfect Meditation Challenge. It's designed for people who beat themselves up about whether they're doing it right. It's hosted by my friend,

the great meditation teacher, Matthew Hepburn. It's free. It lasts for 14 days and you can sign up and join over on the app right now. Quickly also want to mention that we're doing two more live meditation parties at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. We'll put a link in the show notes,

ones in May, ones in October. Come join us, it'll be me, Seven Ice, Lassie, and Jeff Warren. The last one was a blast. Again, link in the show notes, sign up. When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination. With over 750,000 titles, including bestsellers, there's a listen for every type of listener.

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especially on a beach vacation where you've got tons of stuff, buggy boards, etc., it's really nice to have a house you can cook for yourself, have your friends over. We love Airbnb's. Speaking of beaches, maybe you want to go somewhere warm over the winter. While you're away, you could air B&B your home and make some extra money for the trip. Whether you could use some extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun,

your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. For a genius soul Smith, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I've been wanting to talk to you for a while. Evelyn Trouble, who's a long time friend, somebody I've worked with closely recommended you to me like many years ago, so I'm glad we're finally making this happen.

I love Evelyn. That's awesome. So how did you first get interested in food, body image, diet culture, etc? So I started my career as a women's magazine journalist. I covered health and nutrition and fitness for women's magazines, which basically means I wrote diet stories for a long time, like the first decade of my career, was focused on helping people make their bodies smaller in lots of different ways. And I always felt uncomfortable about it. I felt like, was this really making people's lives better? We would hear from our readers over and over that

they were on yet another plan, yet another diet, so I could see how much of a hamster wheel this was for folks. But I think I was doing what a lot of us do in diet culture, which was, well, if I just find the right plan, there must be a way to do this and lose weight and feel good about our bodies and not feel deprived all the time and not feel miserable. And so I'll just keep writing about this until I find the right way to do it. And about 10 years in, I started to realize, yeah, there's not a right way to do that. Like, that's not really what this is about. And then slowly over the next 10 years of my career, and also in the process of becoming a mom and raising two daughters, I started to think more about why are we so focused on telling people to make their bodies smaller? What's really underneath that? And that's when I started to grapple with anti-fat bias and how it shows up and

basically every facet of our culture. So what's the answer then is the answer to why we are so focused on making our bodies look a certain way? Is it all anti-fat bias? And what does that mean specifically? Yeah, that's the big headline, but it is of course a little more nuanced than that. I mean, we live in a society that has always had rigid ideals around the best bodies, what's the most attractive body, what we consider the healthiest body. I mean, you can trace this back to

Greek and Roman times. Every culture in the world has some set of rigid body ideals. Although, of course, there are some periods of history, like the Renaissance and some cultures where people say, look, like bigger bodies were more acceptable, but it's still, there's always this ideal. And what the ideal is really about is upholding societal power structures, right? It's about keeping certain people with a lot of privilege

and power and finding ways to other and demonize folks with less privilege. And so because we operate with that as our framework, everything we then do around bodies has that as the underlying message. And so when we start to talk about conversations around health, around food, we're bringing all of this bias into how we do that. And so it's not surprising that that anti-fabias shows up so much in those arenas. So let me just get this straight.

The powerful people had what we would now consider to be super fit bodies. And by sending the message that this is the way to look, it helped them hold other people down. Well, there's no need to use past tense. I mean, this is still happening. We still live in a culture that reveres a thin white body as the ideal body. And thinner white people tend to be the people with the most power in every culture.

So there's a lot vested in maintaining these power structures. And so the reason I think we focus so much around bodies is because we also operate under this big misconception that body size is something we have total control over, that if you just work hard enough and try hard enough and are disciplined enough and find the right plan, everyone can be thin, right? Like we know not everyone's gonna be white,

but we think everybody can be thin. And so that then further, because we then attach this willpower conversation to weight, and we attach this idea that like you just need to work harder, now we've made it an ethical and immoral issue. And so then anyone in a bigger body, we can say, well, they're just not trying hard enough, or maybe they're not educated, or maybe they're lazy, or in some other way deficient. And so those misconceptions about how

body weight works, which is really rooted in the original science done on weight and health, that's what allows us to perpetuate the bias, but tell ourselves, well, no, this is just about being healthy. This is just not being a good person. I'm not being biased. I'm just focused on like what it means to live a good life. Yeah, I want to get into all that. I think that's fascinating. The notion of willpower and the idea that our bodies can change, perhaps more than we think they can. But just back to the roots of this, and you say it stretches all the way into the present day, but I just think about, you know, there are avatars of white male power that are not slim or fit.

I mean, Donald Trump, Henry VIII, it's not like everybody who I can think of whose powerful in our society looks like an adonis. But how many women who are powerful in our society are allowed to be fat? How many black people who achieve power in our society are allowed to be fat? White men are given a lot more leeway around bodies. They still, I mean, white men still struggle with diet culture. They still face a lot of pressure around bodies.

I think while I am in no way a fan of Donald Trump, I think the rhetoric around his body often becomes extremely toxic and counterproductive to criticizing his politics. But yeah, when you look at who's in power, pretty much the only category of person we allow to be fat. And even then, it's gonna be the subject

of late night talk show jokes. It's gonna be something that gets made fun of on social media. The only person who's allowed to do that is a way, Pam. Interesting. There is a book that was recommended to me by the aforementioned Evelyn Tribbley. And I think she heard about it from you

that talked about the sort of racial roots of anti-fat bias and the book is called Fearing the Black Body. Yes, by Sabrina Strings, yes. Yes, walk us through that thesis if you don't mind. Yeah, so Sabrina Strings work has been absolutely groundbreaking on this Dishon Harrison as another scholar that folks should look into if they want to dive deeper into the intersection of race and weight bias. But what Sabrina really did in that book is trace how

if you go back to when slavery officially ended in the United States, that is around the time that we see the body ideals become increasingly thinner. And the reason for this is because as black folks were no longer enslaved, we're looking at having more power in society, white folks in power had a major incentive to continue to other and demonize black people and especially black women.

And so anti-fab bias is inextricably linked with white supremacy. It's really an offshoot of white supremacy. That's why we're talking about who in power gets to be in a bigger body and it's never black women. So that's really what she traces from times of slavery into modern day. And you can see this over and over in the way

bodies are talked about looking back at historical artifacts, books in media of the time, and then on into how we respond to Lizzo's body or Oprah's body, you know, and seeing the conversation today. You mentioned Lizzo. Would you call her the exception that proves the rule? People seem to be really excited about her body positivity, and I know that's a phrase that you have some concerns about. But that seems to be one of the reasons why she's so popular is that she's comfortable in a larger body.

I think it is a big reason why she's so popular. She's articulating something that a lot of us have felt for a long time and it's hugely encouraging to see someone with her talent, get recognized, and celebrate it in the way that she has been. And at the same time, if you look on any of her social media posts, you see hundreds, if not thousands, of comments critiquing her body

and saying really hateful things about her. So she is a super talented musician. She is also known for being a champion of body positivity, although recently she's also had some complicated work stuff going on, but she is constantly having to navigate anti-fat bias and anti-black racism every time she goes on stage or does an interview or shows up on social media. So yeah, she's both like, look, we're making progress and also look, we're still fighting the Spatle constantly. We'll get to your concerns about body positivity

in a few minutes, but let me just stay again with Antifat bias and its roots. How does all of this play out? Are there smoke-filled back rooms where people who look like me frankly, skinny white guys are dreaming up a conspiracy to hold people down by holding this up as an ideal or is it more nebulous and amorphous than that?

I think people often don't realize the extent to which anti-fap bias exists within them. I think, you know, when I was in women's magazines and writing diet stories, I would have told you that I was completely committed to helping women feel really good about their bodies, that I was a feminist, to believe all our bodies were valuable. It seemed to me at the time that the best way to do that was to make us all slimmer and then we could feel good about our bodies. And that was my anti-fabias that I hadn't yet reckoned with or started to unpack.

That was me thinking that, frankly, that the safest way to exist in this world in a women's body is to conform to beauty ideals if that's a way to achieve power. And so I think it's a lot of things for folks. Do I think there's a backroom? I mean, maybe at Novo Nordesk, the manufacturers of all the weight loss drugs, there's certainly profit-driven reasons

that people market diets and weight loss drugs as aggressively as they do. There's a lot of money on the table. But I also think in terms of each of our own relationship with this issue, it's a lot more to do with the fact that we have learned from the time we were young children that it is not really safe to exist in a fat body in this world. Whether you were a fat kid or a thin kid, you saw the fat kids get bullied. You saw how they were treated differently and othered on the playground. And you've seen that intensify year after year.

And so it's a logical response to think, well, the best strategy is to avoid doing that, especially when we also have this misconception that it is avoidable. So I think it's a lot of people's own stuff coming up in our own emotions around this. You know, it's a really emotional topic for folks. It gets into stuff your mom said to you when you were a kid. It gets into so many different deep areas for people.

I think it's fascinating and really compelling and urgent. I see it in my own mind. I can remember making fun of kids who back then we would have called overweight, but now we would say our larger body or whatever that more acceptable formulation is I can remember doing that as a kid. I can see what happens in my mind. I try to be reasonably mindful of the judgments, the starburst of thoughts that come uninvited when I encounter somebody with a larger body and really have to sort of watch that come and go and not act out of it. But it's still there, that conditioning is still there. I think it's very powerful. I think that what was motivating my question, though, was more a sense of like, when you talk about the roots of anti-fat bias and you talk about the Greco-Roman times

or the end of slavery and I'm just wondering, like, what was the mechanism? Do you think people actually specifically thought up the idea to hold up an ideal body as a way to hold others down or did it just happen in a less organized fashion than that? That's a really good question. I think that there were some pretty conscious efforts around it. I think when you look at the way beauty is described in the Bible, for example, or in any historical text you might examine, I think you can see these repeating themes of women in particular should be small and ethereal and feminine, and over and over these messages that feminine equals small and delicate and that there's

something animalistic or uncouth or manly about being in a larger body. And when you see how that dovetails with a guy who has held power in society, who has been the decision makers, it maybe wasn't a conscious decision of every white man alive in 1868 or whatever, but I think it certainly was recognized as an important strategy. And I think there were people who were pushing it fairly consciously aware of what they were doing.

I think there's no question that today, major weight loss brands like Weight Watchers and NUME and all of the different diet trends we see come and go, yeah, those are folks sitting in room saying we know how insecure our webinar about their bodies, we know how important weight loss feels and we are selling them a solution that we know from our own data doesn't work and that we'll get them to buy into it over and over again. You use the word fat. I struggle to just a moment ago with, you know, what's the right way to describe somebody

in a larger body and I got a little awkward about it. But when you talk about it, you actually unabashedly use the word fat. Why and what are the rules here? Yeah. So I and a lot of folks who identify as fat activists consider it really important to reclaim the word fat. And I should say, you know, for folks who are just listening to this, I live in what I call a small fat body,

meaning I wear plus size clothes, I have a BMI in the obese range, but I am not the level of fat where it is difficult for me to sit on airplanes or fit into public spaces. So, there's different terms like people talk about small fat, mid-fat, super-fat to recognize what level of anti-fat bias they deal with on a daily basis. For me, it's around medical treatment and it's around clothing access. But for folks who are in bigger bodies, it's around hiring practices and navigating public spaces and like really

daily living is impacted by the chronic experience of anti-fatness. So the reason it's so important to talk about that as a spectrum, to name it, and to use the word fat is because it's our way of saying, this is just a body trait about us, this is the same as me saying, I have brown hair or I'm of medium height. And yet we have imbued this word with so much negativity. We have weaponized this word against people for so long. And so if we can reclaim that word, if we can say no, it's just a neutral descriptor.

It's actually a perfectly fine way to have a body. Then we could take some of that power out of it. We can make it. So one of my favorite, that activist Reagan Chastain always says, like, the bullies can't take your lunch money anymore. Because now you've said, yeah, that word doesn't hurt me. And I think lots of marginalized groups talk about the importance of reclaiming slurs against them.

And so this is the way we do that. I will say, I think for folks who are in what we call straight-sized bodies, that would be you, Dan, people who can fit into straight-size clothing and don't need plus sizes or, you know, have very minimal experience, direct experience with anti-fat bias. I think often an even more neutral term is saying something like larger body, bigger body, because of fat person talking to you doesn't know what you mean when you say fat, right?

Like it means something different to everybody. Not every fat person wants to reclaim fat, or that doesn't feel appropriate for everybody. I think it was an easier process for me because I had a lot of thin privileges as a kid. I didn't directly experience the playground bullying that a lot of fat kids still. So for me, it's been about embracing this identity as an adult, which is a really different process than it is for someone who's like, no, my whole life, that word has been used to hurt me. So it's not for us to say everyone needs to say a fat, I think the best thing we can do is a talk about people's body sizes way, way less than we do. Like you don't need to be commenting

on someone else's body most of the time. But then if it does somehow seem necessary, ask people what they want to be called, how they identify and then use that term. But yeah, for me personally fat is not a bad word. In my house with my kids, fat is not a bad word. And reclaiming that has been really powerful and really helpful.

And I see that, you know, with lots of my readers as well. And words to avoid include obese and overweight? Yes, we call these the O words. And the reason for this is these are words that have been used to pathologize and stigmatize fat people for decades. Obesity comes from a Latin word that root of which literally means to know oneself's fat,

like to eat compulsively until you become fat. So right in that term, we see embedded this really harmful stereotype. Not everybody is fat because they eat uncontrollably. That is a ugly stereotype that is not helpful to anybody accessing medical care. It's not a helpful way to judge or, you know, describe people's bodies.

That folks, I think it depends how aligned they feel with fat activism, whether they want to reclaim the word fat. Even folks who don't want to identify as fat usually don't want to identify as obese or overweight because that word has been used in such a harmful way. And so in my own writing on my newsletter, Brant Toast, I usually, if I have to use that term, stick an asterisk in it, just as a way of acknowledging, this is a really harmful word for a lot of us, and we don't want to see it written down. In the medical research, in the way doctors talk about this issue, we unfortunately have not made very much headway.

So it's difficult as a journalist writing about these issues to report on it without using that term, but it's something I try to be really mindful of. difficult as a journalist writing about these issues to report on it without using that term, but it's something I try to be really mindful of. You mentioned that there are still issues vis-a-vis the medical community. A question that comes up a lot, and I've seen this in, I'm thinking of a podcast episode I heard recently from a center-right outlet, let's call it that, where the commentators were really taking a hard run at this idea of health at any size, just everything you've been talking about.

There are certain body types, and to pathologize somebody in a larger body and say that that's causing them health problems is inappropriate and unfair and destructive. Their argument was, no, this is like the apex of political correctness to say that there are no health ramifications to having a larger body and, quote unquote, overeating. I'm not saying I agree with any of this, but I'm interested to hear your response to this argument that I suspect is coming up in the minds of some of our listeners right now.

Totally. So a couple of things I want to clarify. It's actually not health at any size. The framework that's used to promote a more weight-inclusive approach to health care is health at every size, meaning no matter what your body size, you have a right to pursue health, and you have a right to access health care. That is different from saying everybody at every body size will be healthy. You know, when we say everybody at every body size will be healthy, that know, when we say everybody and everybody's size

will be healthy, that's actually a pretty healthest way of talking about it, right? Like that's ignoring the fact that of course people in all body sizes get all sorts of health problems. And I think we actually put a lot of moral value on health in much the same way we do weight. And so what ends up happening when people say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you can't be

saying that everybody is healthy and a larger body. Number one, no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying the relationship between weight and health is a lot more nuanced than we've been led to understand. The research is a lot less clear cut than we think. But number two, we don't have to be healthy at every size to be deserving of respect and dignity. We don't have to be healthy and larger size to be deserving of respect and dignity. We don't have to be healthy and larger bodies

in order to be treated like human beings. Health is not a prerequisite for living without bias. And so when we say, well, no one can be healthy this way, what you're really doing is justifying your anti-fabias. You're saying, it's okay for me to not like fat people because they're unhealthy. And that is a really problematic argument. Is there no connection between body size and health,

notwithstanding the fact that that might be a loaded term in this discussion? No, I think health and body size can be really connected, but what the research shows is that it's often not connected in the ways you think. So, you know, one of the largest pieces of research we have, a large meta-analysis of data on weight and mortality, found that folks in the, quote, overweight BMI category lived longer than folks in the normal weight category, and even low obese BMI appeared to be protective in a way that the normal BMI was not protective.

At either ends of the spectrum, the underway and the higher obese categories, in both cases you saw higher rates of mortality. But what that tells us when you look at that data, is that either weight is playing a different role in this than we thought, or weight has less to do with this than we thought, right? And so what we need to talk about is a concept called correlation, not causation.

All of the research that claims to say that high body weight is causative of poor alatho coms, is actually talking about correlations. We see that folks in larger bodies tend to have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, respiratory issues, you know, a whole host of factors. But when we step back from that relationship and say, well, what else could be going on there? We also find that folks in larger bodies are less money than thinner folks. So we're talking about the impact of socioeconomic status on health.

We know that there's an overlap between body size and race, which means folks in larger bodies may be more likely to be living with the effects of chronic racism. So there's a lot else going on. Also, if you're fat, it's harder to go to the gym because you're probably gonna get treated badly when you're there, right?

It's harder to find workout clothes. I can tell you it's harder to find sports bras with it. And then when you show up in a workout space, you're likely to be getting harassed or just a ton of negative attention. So when we say like, oh, fat people are less healthy, we need to look at, well, what role is bias playing in making it more difficult for fat folks to pursue health? And if you're at the grocery store and people feel free to comment on the contents of your grocery cart, which has happened to fat friends of mine.

People feel very free to weigh in and say, hey, that melon has too much sugar. You shouldn't buy it. Yeah, maybe it's a little harder to feel like you can navigate shopping for healthy foods because you're going to get treated badly when you try it. So it's just a lot more care than we think. Now, does this mean that weight never plays a causal role in

health? No, there could absolutely be situations where weight is negatively influencing health. But then we get to the other problem with all of this, which is for the most part, we do not have safe, sustainable, and affordable accessible ways for people to lose weight. So even if weight is an underlying cause of poor health outcomes, when we look at the high failure rate of dieting, when we look at how experiences of chronic weight loss take a toll on people's physical health and their mental health raising their risk for disorder eating and eating disorders, we have to say, well, hang on, why are we pushing weight

loss as the solution to this health issue when we don't actually have a safe and effective way to do that for most people? You wouldn't take a drug that your doctor said, well, this has a 95% failure rate, but dieting has an 85% to 95% failure rate every time you do it. And yet, if you are fat,

that's what your doctor's gonna tell you to do most of the time, instead of actually treating your real health issues. That's what your doctor is going to tell you to do most of the time, instead of actually treating your real health issues. That's so interesting. Is there anything other than dieting that might be safe and effective in terms of losing weight? I'm thinking about like bariatric surgery, I have a friend who did that. What about things like ozemic? Yeah, I mean, this is the weight loss industry's big quest to change that, right?

Like for decades, we've been able to say, look, diets don't work. Stop prescribing us diets. And so they're like, okay, well, we're still selling weight loss. Let's push surgery. Let's push drugs. Yeah, both surgery and weight loss drugs show initial higher weight loss outcomes than dieting and exercise. This is true.

But what that doesn't tell us is long-term side effects. It doesn't tell us how the experience of undergoing bariatric surgery or living on a weight loss drug might impact your relationship with food, your relationship with your body. There's a whole host of mental health outcomes. Bariatric surgery in particular is associated with a higher risk of post-surgery, alcohol abuse,

and also risk for suicide and depression. So this is not a quick fix, this is not a silver bullet, this is asking someone to dramatically overhaul their life and take on a whole set of new risks and expenses in order to achieve thinness. I would want to be really clear that that was my best and only option for promoting my health. And because the presence of anti-fat bias is so intense, because it is in every exam room

that a fat person goes into at a doctor's office, it's really hard for fat folks to feel like, yes, this is definitely my best option, as opposed to, well, this is the option they're telling me I have to do, but I don't know. Maybe there's a different treatment they'd give a thinner patient that's not being made available to me. So, if your doctor is telling you it's an emergency, you need to lose weight. If I'm hearing you correctly, that's an impossible and shitty situation because yes, you may need

to lose weight in order to alleviate some health problems, but there really is no safe and effective way to do that. I mean, it is a shitty situation, and I want to be really clear, like whenever we talk about this, I am not telling anyone what to do with their individual bodies or health. This may be the logical step for some folks to take. This may even, this may be the logical step for some folks to take. This may even be a good and health promoting step for some folks to take. But what I'm concerned about is the discourse around weight loss is so entrenched and this bias is so prevalent. I don't feel like we're getting the chance to make these choices without that being major contributing factors. I mean, often folks are told they need to do this in order to access the real health treatment, right?

Like, women are turned away from fertility clinics. If they have a higher BMI, because doctors think they're too hard to work on, they'll be harder to get pregnant. So they tell them, we'll go do bariatric surgery, lose a bunch of weight, and then come back and we'll try to get you pregnant. Well, if you do that, you're now spending two years and we know time is a huge factor in fertility, all this money, all the stress on the body, to undergo the weight loss surgery before you can even begin to get the medical treatment you tried to show up for. So that's one of the concerns

I have is that it's too often being used as a barrier to the healthcare folks really need, because when doctors see fat patients, not all doctors, but many doctors see fat patients, they start and stop with the number on the scale. Coming up, Virginia Sol Smith talks about how we can combat antifat bias we inflict on ourselves and others, and noticing the subtle ways that we engage with diet culture, even if we're not on a diet, and some nuanced strategies for disentangling. Welcome to the happiest place on Earth, where you're a new kind of happiest every time you visit, only at the Disneyland Resort in California. Visit Disneyland.ca for important details subject to availability and change without notice park admission and reservation or park entry.

I'm F.W.H. I'm Peter Fragerpeg. And in our new podcast Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Pablo Picasso. The ultimate giant of modern art, everyone has heard of or seen a Picasso work. All the Picasso brand on something. But a man with a complicated, difficult, personal side too, that makes us look at his art in a different way. He was a genius and he was very problematic.

Follow Legacy Now, wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge entire seasons of Legacy ad-free on Amazon Music, all by subscribing to Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Quick reminder, you can join the free 14-day imperfect meditation challenge over on the 10% happier app right now. It features a meditation teachers car ally Don Mauricio and Matthew Hepburn. What do you recommend that we, whatever our body size happens to be, that we can do to combat anti-fat bias as we inflicted on ourselves.

In other words, judging our own bodies, obsessing about our own body size and comparing ourselves to people on Instagram, or in any form of media, and people who can attack this as a second question, as we inflicted on other people. And of course, we're going to talk about our kids later in this conversation, but even just in the hiring process, in judgments we make, in our friend groups, and on the street, et cetera, et cetera. What can we do to work with these deeply, deeply ingrained patterns? This is honestly such a big and important question, because one offshoot of anti-fat bias is we don't yet have a lot of research telling us how to be anti-fat bias, right?

Because it's so prevalent. Researchers are just starting to figure out how to study, how do you unlearn this bias? But a couple of thoughts I've had as I've been reporting on this, you know, for more than a decade now, one of the most helpful mindset shifts we can make is to start to understand that this is a larger systemic bias. This is not just, I don't like how I look in the shirt. It really is, I don't like how I look in the shirt because I live in a I don't like how I look in the shirt because I live in a culture that has told me since I was born that any sign of fatness

is a sign of moral failure and a lack of willpower and all of these other things. And so starting to shift your thinking from, I feel bad about my body too. I'm in a culture that has taught me to feel bad about my body. That can really help because now you're putting the blame where it belongs, right?

You're taking it off yourself and you're putting it on the industries and the cultural norms. I think similarly, when we start to think about, how is my bias showing up when I engage with other people? I mean, number one, if you're a thin person, don't ask your fat friends to tell you how to do this, right? Like this is your work to do. But just start to notice when it comes up and think to yourself, how much is this person's body size leading me to assume that they are less informed than me

on a subject? How much has this person's body size leading me to assume they aren't as qualified for this job? Or sure they say they work out, but do they really? How much can they work out if they're still built like that? Start to notice where you are deciding things about other human beings based on what you're seeing. And then I think a useful sort of thought exercise can be to think, well, if this person was gay,

or if this person was black, if they were marginalized in a different way, would I be okay with the fact that I just made all these assumptions about them based on this one trait? And this is not to say that like we've solved racism or homophobia, we absolutely haven't, but I think a lot of us are very mindful of trying to really actively unlearn those biases and notice when they come up. And I think you can use the same strategy to start to understand how you approach fat folks. Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, in some ways, this is like the last acceptable bias.

You know, it's like you're not going to get canceled, or at least maybe now you will get canceled, but until recently, you wouldn't get canceled for calling somebody fat. Well, I'm just always mindful of that because it is one of the last acceptable biases that I think about ageism or healthism or anti-disability. I think there's still a lot, you know, so I'm just always mindful of like, let's not say it's the only last acceptable bias because that's probably just my bias, meaning I'm not noticing something else. Fair point. But for sure, it's on a list of like, you can make these jokes and walk away from them in a way that other biases we have a little more cultural awareness of now. Just to say I like your idea of replacing, you know, doing this thought experiment of would

I be thinking these things if the issue was something a little bit more salient in the popular consciousness? I, my son is eight and he's really in a football and we've had a lot of conversations about why it's, in my opinion, and I think I'm not the only one who has this opinion, not a good idea to be naming professional teams after indigenous tribes. And I often say, well, how would you feel

if we called them the rabbis? And that seems like a similar approach. You're taking something that we already commonly agree on is not the right move and moving in into this arena. I love that. I described a little bit before my amateurish little process here, which is to use my mindfulness, my meditation skills to notice when I'm having, in its wild, when you really pay attention to this, when

I'm having thoughts about other people that are just coming in a flurry uninvited and to try to just let them come and go without criticizing myself too much, but not acting on them. How does that sound as a way to try to at least not be a major contributor to the problem? I think it's a really awesome first step. I actually did something similar, you know, when my older daughter was around two and I was really starting this unlearning work,

I made a comment in front of her when I about my own body and she repeated it back to me and I had this moment of like, oh, this is how I pass it on. I say terrible things about my body and then my daughter, who's probably going to be built like me,

is going to grow up internalizing all this, so this has to stop. And so I did that same kind of thing for about a year and a half, every time I would have a negative thought, before I would verbalize it, I would stop and notice, where's that coming from, and what's really underneath it, and do that process. And it was wild how many times a day I had to do that in the beginning.

Like it was a lot. Again, women's magazine casualty here. So like the stuff ran deep. But it did really help me start changing that voice in my own head, changing my relationship with myself. And it rippled out to like doing the same thing with other folks. And yeah, I think it's a great starting point. So let's stay with you for a second, because that's the other side of the coin here. The two sides of the coin, at least, that are in my mind right now, is how anti-fat bias results in you treating other people, including maybe your kids in a way that's not so helpful. And the other side is how you are talking to yourself

and treating yourself in your own attitudes about your body and food. How did you work through that process? Where are you now? What would you recommend, et cetera, et cetera? You know, like I said, it really did start with this mental process of just noticing how often I was hard on my body.

And then from there I I started to think, well, if my body is not to blame, like what's really going on? And I could notice that I was more uncomfortable when I would be going into situations where a lot of anti-fat bias would be present, right? Like a social gathering of New York media folks. There's a lot of anti-fat bias in those rooms.

So yeah, it makes sense that I'm feeling stressed out going into them is someone in a larger body. And so I could start to recognize like, this is a systemic bias that's showing up for me and my relationship with myself. And I don't need to do that to myself. This also meant, yes, making a conscious decision to stop dieting myself and starting to look a little more critically at what I was

considering not a diet. I think this is a very common step for folks like you'll say like, well, I'm not dieting anymore. And you think that means like I'm not joining weight watchers anymore. But if you're still really focused on eating whole foods or you're still really focused on counting your steps or like there's all these sort of softer, gentler ways we engage with diaculture that can trigger the same toxic relationship with your body. And so there was a period of a few years where I would be trying a new workout or thinking about eating in a different way

and have to say like, oh, wait a second, this is putting me back in that same mindset. This is triggering that same stuff. And that's hard because sometimes it's something you really have convinced yourself is a great idea and you have to be willing to step back from. Yeah, those were two things of the sort of personal work. I think these days I feel fairly fully divested from diet culture in terms of like even to the point that when I do work out I really try to give money to fitness creators.

You know, I don't want to give money to diet brands. This is something that's personally important to me. I'm not saying everyone needs to do it. But so, you know, I try to seek out fitness creators who are

coming at it from a way inclusive perspective where I'm not going to have to tune out instructor chatter about like getting over your holiday weight or whatever, just because I know I don't want that noise in my life. Curating social media feeds is another big way to sort of start to turn down the volume

on how many messages you're getting. And then when you do get the messages, it's easier to be like, oh, yeah, that is not in line with my values anymore. But I also want to be clear, you know,, that is not in line with my values anymore. But I also want to be clear, I have the privilege of never having struggled with a clinical eating disorder. For a lot of folks, this dev tails into a true mental health struggle.

This is not something you should try to do by yourself. This is something you deserve full support to navigate, whether that's a full medical team, a therapist, a dietitian. this isn't work we can just kind of like positively think our way out of. You've been living in a culture that told you to hate your body for decades, and they have intersected with your own mental health vulnerabilities, and you need a lot of health

and support to get through that, and you deserve that. It's a great point, I'm glad you made that. It's such a tricky dynamic that on the one hand, you are doing some things that you are at least partially motivated by a healthy desire to take care of your body, working out, et cetera, et cetera. But you can also notice when you're crossing this line into conforming or listening to the voice of the system,

the diet culture. And so how do you walk that line between, we do know that exercise, at least I believe we know that exercise is good for us, movement is good for us, and so how do you walk the line between engaging and stuff that we know is good for us and not having this corrupted motivation?

Well, I think you can get part of the way. I mean, and this is going to look different for everyone. But for me, it has been in really thinking about how does this experience make me feel in my body? So if I am trying to do a workout that feels impossibly hard, that if I skip a day, I feel really bad. I skip today, that seems like in order to really do successfully, I should dramatically change how I eat,

and also this is an activity that has a very specific body ideal, and I am miles away from that body ideal, and now I'm starting to feel bad, that I don't have the right body for whatever sport I'm trying to do. Like, all of that is a sign that, well, yeah, moving your body might still be really good for your physical metabolic health. The mental cost of this relationship with exercise

is starting to tip the balance away from any of those physical benefits. And we know that people who exercise in more just sort of ways are more likely to get injured, they're more likely to increase their risk for also having eating problems. It does not benefit your health to engage with dieting and exercise

in these aggressive, restrictive, punitive ways. Like I had to really put down running because for me in my 20s running was something, like I said, I'd never had a diagnosed eating disorder, but I had a really disordered relationship with running, like running on stress fractures, running compulsively, you know, pushing myself harder than was safe in my body.

And 20 years later, I'm still dealing with like the knee and ankle issues from. So that was not a health promoting behavior, even if maybe my resting heart rate was lower in my 20th son it is now. It wasn't health promoting for my mind or my feet or my ankles. And so for me, it's been really putting down

a type of exercise that I knew triggered me in that way and experimenting with stuff like strength training, gardening, walking in the woods with my dog, you know, stuff that I find super pleasurable, enjoyable, when I'm doing it. I actually don't have to talk myself into doing those activities. I'm excited or at least like,

oh yeah, that's gonna be nice. I know that's gonna feel good. And it doesn't trigger this cascade of needing to weigh myself a lot or needing to change how I eat or feeling bad. Like I never feel bad in my body when I'm doing it. So for me, that's like, okay, there's a lot of physical health benefits

to walking and gardening and lifting weights. And there's all these like mental parks that make them fun to do. I like that. We did an interview a couple of months ago with a great meditation teacher named Kara Lai. And I put it in the show notes. It really had a big impact on me. And she talked about her own history of running and how she couldn't run when she got Lyme disease later in her life, and that was really tricky for her, and it really forced her to look

at what was motivating the running. And one of the things I took away from that is, you know, right before I exercise, I do this little thing that, you know, honestly, if you told me 10 years ago that I would do this, I would have laughed, but I just set an intention. And by the way, 10-year ago version of Dan, there's a lot of scientific evidence to show that this can be very helpful. And I know you 10 year ago, Dan, like science, setting an intention can actually really have some positive psychological benefits. So I just set the intention that I'm doing this to make myself stronger and happier and calmer so that I can help other people be stronger and happier and calmer. I'm not saying all of my diet culture motivations have been extirpated forever,

but it does, I find, turn the dial towards sanity in a meaningful way. Yeah. Just curious what you think of that. Yeah, I love that. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's enabling you to notice what exercise does for you in a way that has nothing to do with body size. And I think that's often a hard thing for folks to let go of when you've been conditioned,

for so many of us, I was not an athletic child. So for me, exercise was only something I engaged with once I started to gain weight in my later teenagers and 20s as a way to control my body and so figuring out how to drop that as like the definition of exercise was my work to do. And so finding a different intention is huge and the other thing is I think it lets you assess, is this what I need today? If that's my intention, like is this going to achieve it, right? And what often leads us into overexercising and exercising in ways that are a cost to our mental health is feeling like, if I skip this workout, I'm a failure. If I skip this workout, I will gain weight. But if your intention is, I want to be calmer and put that out into the world, then maybe

most of the time that means exercising will get you there, but maybe other times it's an app, right? And these are morally equivalent activities. And then you can start to take a more comprehensive view of your whole relationship with your body. It's not just driving towards this one purpose of thinness. That's what so many of us internalize for so long. We have a lot more to do here than that.

Let's talk about eating. For many of us, this is just like a war zone, you know, our relationship to food. Where are you with this now? You mentioned something earlier that I think might have been triggering for people, which is you said in a kind of negative light that you can get too focused on eating, quote unquote, whole foods. And I can imagine a lot of people listening It's been like what the fuck is wrong with that isn't that we're supposed to do. So where are you with eating and what do you recommend?

For others in terms of being sane in this frayed sphere of human activity Well, definitely a great starting point with the eating conversation is our friend Eveline Troubley's work on intuitive eating conversation is our friend Evelyn Troubley's work on intuitive eating for a lot of us that's a really helpful first step to divesting from diet culture and starting to forge a different path. And what you do in intuitive eating is start to understand that food doesn't have a moral value. That french fries are morally equivalent to roasted potatoes, to kale salad, to quinoa, to whatever other foods you have on your like, should eat list versus your don't eat list. And this is really supported by science. Like we know the more we label foods as bad and forbidden and we're not allowed to have them, the more we obsess over them and fixate on them, and when we do eat them, eat them

in these sort of out of control-seeming ways. So often, one of the reasons people think they aren't a dieter is because they think they are a binge eater. They think it's not that I'm restricting too much. When I get a plate of cookies, I'm totally out of control around them. But the underlying cause of the vast majority of binge eating is restriction. Whether it's a conscious, I'm dieting, I'm not going to eat that, I'm going to be so good today, I'm not going to allow myself to eat that. And then inevitably, most of us, that willpower,

it's a wall because of the way we're wired as human beings, not because of our lack of willpower or failings. But it can also be more subtle. It can be like, I'm busy all day taking care of my kids and working and lunch was a granola bar. And now it's 8 p.m. and I have an eat in an eight hours. And so now I'm gonna eat everything and cite. That's actually your body trying really hard to keep up with what you threw out at that day. And like, you did not feed me enough

and we're gonna correct that balance now. And of course, then you're drawn to foods that you think are, quote, bad because they're gonna be more filling and faster to get a hold of and whatever. So a lot of it is stripping away all of this morality. We attach to food and recognizing that your body is pretty smart. You know, somewhere in there,

you were once a baby that knew when you were hungry and when you were full. And those are instincts that can get very, very, very buried by a diet culture and disorder eating, but are in there somewhere and your body deserves that trust and respect as you like work to get that back. Now, folks who are in the active stages of an eating disorder, they can't jump straight to and to a疑 eating, right? Like, the disorder is eating disorder, they can't jump straight to intuitive eating, right? Like the disorders too loud, they're gonna feel like their body's telling them not to eat, or so they do need a more supported approach

of male schedules and things to get them back to being able to do this. But for a lot of us who had a more recreational relationship with dieting or even a part-time job with dieting, I think a lot of people can identify with, starting to give yourself full permission to eat, is just a radical shift that will lead you to notice all sorts of things. And yeah, in the beginning, it's for sure going to mean that you're going to want to eat all the foods. You didn't let yourself eat for years, because your body is like, well, finally, we can do this.

But over time, you're gonna notice, you're gonna be able to sort of tune in to what you really like and dislike. And the really interesting thing about nutritional science is we don't really have a lot of good data. I mean, we know that, of course, fruits and vegetables are healthy. I'm not telling people not to eat fruits and vegetables.

But we also know that when of course, fruits and vegetables are healthy. I'm not telling people not to eat fruits and vegetables. But we also know that when people have enough food to eat, when they are properly fueling their bodies, the micro details of, like, how much iron do you need? And, like, all these sort of details that we can get really long up on, those tend to work themselves out. So you don't actually need to be obsessing so much about a perfect way to eat. And yet eating whole foods is a great thing to do if that's in your budget. If you have time to cook, if you like them, you're going to enjoy sharing meals with your loved ones. That's all great. But if you need

other options, that's great too. Yeah, just to say intuitive eating is a rich vast subject. And we've done many episodes on it and we'll continue to do many episodes on it. And for people who want to go deeper, there are links in the show notes. And I highly recommend it. And I've gotten a lot out of it personally. I consider that this is my eating religion and it has been for a while. But I will say, I'm trying to think three or four years into working with Evelyn directly. I still struggle with it. So I'm curious, are there times where you feel like you can

get weird around food or disordered around food even today? I'm just trying to think, because I don't want to say a flip now. And then later I'll be like, oh, I forgot to tell them about the thing. Um, for the most part, no. For the most part, food is a source of joy in my life. It's also not by any means like the only joy or something I spend a ton of time and emotion on at this point. I mean, I am a mom of two daughters. So a lot of my

relationship with food these days is making family meals happen. And when you add in the complicating factors of feeding children and all of their preferences, you know, it is a treat for me to get to just pick what I want to eat purely. Like, what am I going to have for lunch? Like, that's delightful when my kids are at school. But a lot of how I think about food now is I'm feeding three of us. I need to think through how we're all getting fed and how we're getting our needs met.

So that changed it a little bit. But I think, no, bottom line for me, food feels joyful. If I eat something that diet culture would have told me was quote unquote bad, and I eat a lot of it because it tastes really good, and I haven't had it in a while or whatever I'm having a day, and it's nice to eat cookies. I'm pretty able to say like, yeah, that might have been what I needed today.

And okay, or even if it wasn't what I needed today, it was a day, and tomorrow will be another day and I'll eat different foods. And I do notice, I kinda eat a wide range of foods. Like, if I haven't had a salad in a few days, I'll be interested in a salad. I definitely see that, I've been flowed. But for me, taking the morality out of it and taking the restriction out of it has just opened up a lot of possibilities.

So now it's this fun thing that is helpful and certainly important. I mean, I'm really crabby when I'm hungry. So I'm not gonna skip lunch ever, but it's not something that I feel a lot of stress around for myself personally, which is nice. But again, I wanna just name like, if that's not your experience,

if you've been working on this, it's okay to need more support. This is really hard stuff. And for a lot of us, it takes a long time. What about self-consciousness and self-criticism around body size? For you, you mentioned going to New York media parties and feeling self-conscious back in the day.

Does that never happen anymore? Do you never pass a reflective surface and find yourself judging yourself harshly? No, I think that's still there. That's probably the harder one for me. Because I was not a hardcore dieter, rebuilding my relationship with food, I think was more straightforward.

Exercise was a little trickier, and then, honestly, a lot of where it shows up is wardrobe anxiety. It is harder to find clothes that fit when you wear plus sizes, so your options are limited. And yet, you know, I work in an industry with a lot of focus on style. I also like clothes. It's fun for me to pick out cool clothes. And so that can become a place where I put a lot

of that. But at least now I have the awareness of, oh, I'm getting anxious about what to wear. And I'm taking it out of my body. But it's really the fall of this system that the fashion industry, despite the fact that 60% of American women wear plus sizes, most brands I like to shop at don't carry my size anymore. And I think, again, that helpful pivot, whenever possible, you can name who the real bad guy here is. It's never your body.

And we touched on body positivity a little bit, and I think the limitation of body positivity is that we stay focused on all this personal work. And we think, well, if I could just love my body, it would all be okay. And what that does is, number one, it's not terribly realistic, right? Like for a lot of people, these wounds are so deep,

loving your body may feel really out of reach for a really long time. But number two, it turns the whole thing into this personal responsibility project, which again is diaculture, right? Like it's not our responsibility to love our bodies and therefore be free of diaculture. We have a, I would argue like a human responsibility to try to change the system. It's not like I am somehow failing in a bad person if I'm feeling bad about my body. Today, it's like, yeah, I'm having a logical response to existing as a fat woman in this culture. And so I can notice the thoughts and not get as caught up in them because I'm like, well, here's the system again, show on up in my closet.

Something else you mentioned, maybe it was only an oblique reference, but the relationship between men and diet culture. The first thing I ever read from you, I believe in your newsletter, Burnt Toast, was sent to me by Evelyn Tribbley, who would keep referencing. And I thought this was so spot on about how men do biohacking, attract their calories, attract their heart rate, women do this too, but a lot of them guys I know are like really into this stuff. They're tracking their sleep, they're tracking everything.

I go out to dinner and lunch a lot with dudes and you know, watch how they obsess over the Chitay Order and it seems like a minefield for people who are not at least traditionally thought of as having disordered relationships with food and their body. And your argument, if I'm restating you correctly, is that this biohacking or the posting of our abs on Instagram or our latest workout on Instagram is all just disordered eating gussied up as something else. Yeah, it's been given the gravitas of science

and of the fact men are doing it. We expect women to hate their bodies because even if you're sort of skeptical of what I'm saying about patriarchy and white supremacy, you've just known enough women. So you know that women hate their bodies because this is how women talk about it. And it's normalized.

We don't expect men women hate their bodies, because this is how women talk about it. And it's normalized. We don't expect men to hate their bodies. And that has a couple of major consequences. One is when men are struggling with eating disorders, or with any kind of disordered relationship with food and exercise, which millions of men do, it gets ignored or dismissed or even reinforced. When Gwyneth Peltro talks about her diet, people are like, oh my God, Gwyneth Peltro

on the bone broth, that's crazy. When Jack Dorsey talked about intermittent fasting, all these people were like, oh my gosh, it seems so smart and evidence-based, and I guess I should do intermittent fasting. Like, there's a gravitas we give men around this subject. That means if they're really struggling, they're getting told they're right.

And that's super unhelpful. And the normalizing of it also means if you have kids in the house, and dad is counting as macros, or doing a Zion man training, and getting really obsessive about carbs, kids are noticing all of that. And this is why I put a chapter on dads in my book Fat Talk, because it's really

common when I interview folks about their relationship with bodies. The first thing they tell me about is what their mom said. But then as we get deeper into the conversation, it's like, oh yeah, Dad was there too. And there was all this other stuff. And because we give men this free pass, just in all the ways of like being somehow the less influential parent, women are conditioned to be more in charge of food and meals and all of that. We aren't thinking about the fact that this is still a trusted love to dull in the house and what are they modeling to kids. So yeah, it's really complicated and it means that men really don't have a language to

talk about this very easily. And that was really clear when I was reporting the book, and I would interview a man for that chapter, they could tell me lots of facts about their workouts, they could explain to me about closing all the rings on their apple watches and tracking their macros and all that, but when I would say, like, how does this make you feel?

And this is like painting with a little bit of a broad brush, but I can tell you, when I ask a woman that question, we talk for like 35 minutes, and when I ask a man that question, there's just this heartbreaking discomfort. It's hard for them to access. That has so much to do with how we're conditioning boys, you know, anger's the only valid emotion. And you know, it just gets into so much else in our culture around how we socialize gender, but it's definitely something I'm super concerned about. That I don't think we figured out a good way to talk about. And a big reason for that is I don't see enough men in this space.

Like, I really appreciate that you want to have this conversation, because I don't see enough men talking about their own struggles, naming and reckoning with anti-fab bias. You know, I can tell you 98% of my readers are women. And that has always been the case. And yeah, I come from women's magazines, but like I'm not writing for women's magazines anymore, but the men aren't coming to the table on this in the same way.

Coming up Virginia talks about how our kids get caught up in diet culture and what parents can do, what her smartest critic would say about her various arguments and ask her about her take on Ozembek. Hi, I'm Anna and I'm Emily. We're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Terribly Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities. Our latest season is all about the Catwalk Queen Naomi Campbell. The years Naomi show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities. Our later

season is all about the Catwalk Queen Naomi Campbell. The years Naomi had to fight to be treated barely in an industry that was overwhelmingly white. That drive saw her break down barriers and reached the pinnacle of high fashion, but it also got her into some dangerous situations when it spilled over into an anger she couldn't control. In our new season, Naomi Campbell's model behavior, we tell the story of how a young girl from South London became a trailblazing black icon, but had some very public falls of how she stood up to the British tabloids and one, and then lense she had to go to to be the first black woman in history to make the cover of French vogue.

But she risks losing it all when her explosive behaviour lands her in court. Follow Terabie Famers wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and add free on Wondry Thus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. You did bring up kids and your most recent book is called Fat Talk Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. What would you describe as the basic thesis there? How are kids getting caught up in all of this and what is a parent to do? So I think what we're really seeing in parenting today is that a lot of us are very aware. We want to do things differently than how we grew up.

If you were a kid in the 80s or 90s, you were inducted into diet culture at quite a young age. You were given a lot of really strict messages around food in your body. And I think there's been a real reckoning where we're recognizing the harm that caused, but for so many parents, they don't know what to do instead. And that's because while they're thinking, I really don't want my child to struggle

the way I did. I really don't want my child to have a needing disorder. But in so many parents' minds, there's this unspoken thing of, but I also don't want them to be fat. And again, that's a logical reaction to a fat foe, but culture, right? Like you're recognizing that that makes life harder for your child and you want to protect it. But if we as parents are saying, so my job as a parent is to do everything I can to prevent

your fatness or correct your fatness, what we're saying to our kids is that the bias is true, that their body is the problem. And so what I'm doing with this book is helping parents really understand where that bias comes from, how they can start to unlearn it, and then really look at how it shows up in all of these arenas of family life,

where it just has no business. I mean, it shows up for kids on the soccer field when the way coaches talk to them, it shows up in the classroom, with comments teacher makes, the cafeteria, but it also shows up in our family dinner table. You know, it shows up if your kids are watching you try on clothes and not like how they look. So it's really important that we as parents start to name it

and notice it when it's happening and then think about how do we change the conversation? Let's get down to brass tax. You've got a kid at the table who won't eat their vegetables. What do you do? You accept that that child is going to take a long time to learn de-efetchables. One of my favorite studies is this soup study where they told half the kids,

you have to finish your carrot soup in order to get dessert. And the other half of the kids, they were like, here's the soup, here's the dessert, do what you want, no pressure. The kids who were told you have to finish your carrot soup, ate less of the soup, liked it less, like rated it as tasting terrible, and wanted the dessert far more than the kids who were given the freedom to try the soup or not try the soup. It is so hard and annoying to do this.

Believe me, if someone who feeds children every day, it is a maddening, labor intensive project. And I am not saying I have all the answers, but I do think the research is so clear that pressure and restriction is what breeds fixation and disorder eating. And that when we step back and give kids the space to explore lots of different foods on their own terms, they get there, but that may look different, that may not mean every child grows up to love broccoli, right?

And the good news is you can survive as a human being, not liking broccoli, like it's gonna be okay. But over time, kids will get to the place they need to get what they're eating, where they can eat different foods, they can meet their nutritional needs, and they feel confident and safe in their bodies. And that's the other piece of it. When we heap on all this pressure and restriction on kids, what we're telling them is don't trust

your body, you're getting it wrong. You can't listen to yourself. And when you think about like where you and I have tried to get to within two and a eating, if we're starting with kids at a young age saying don't listen to yourself. And when you think about like where you and I have tried to get to within two at a veting, if we're starting with kids at a young age saying don't listen to yourself, listen to me, eat how I'm telling you to eat, we're basically programming kids to grow up and turn to diets because they have not learned to trust themselves. They think of food as this thing they need to outsource to someone else. I remember my dad once telling me that the hardest part of being a parent is letting his kids make their own mistakes. I remember my dad once telling me that the hardest part of being a parent is letting

his kids make their own mistakes. I don't think he was referring to eating there. But what I think you're saying is we just got to stop the pressure, stop the restrictions, let kids eat what they want. And that made me involve a lot of frustration and nail biting and watching them gorge on things that we've internalized as sinful, etc., etc. But ultimately, they will find their way. Yeah, and it's not to say that food is a non-stop free for all in your house.

Like kids do need structure. A child is able to queue into their own hunger and fullness cues. They know what tastes good for them. They have preferences, but they don't have the cognitive capability to plan and grocery shop and cook dinner and clean up and do all of those steps. They need our support to tell them where meals happen, what time meals happen.

So a model that I often direct folks to is called Division of Responsibility. It was developed by a eating therapist named Ellen Satter. And it really talks about putting some structure in place so that kids can rely on the fact that food will be available at meal times. And so you would serve a range of foods at dinner, and that will include foods you know your kids will eat and enjoy. But it might also include some foods that they're still learning what they think about them. And then you let them decide from what you've offered, which they're going to eat, and which they're going to go back

for seconds of. They're still getting presented with these other foods that you're hoping they may learn to like, but you're not going to die on the mountain of Brussels sprouts anymore. You're going to say like, Brussels sprouts are on the table. Also here, cheese and crackers. So if you hate the rest of dinner, I know you're not going to starve and we can enjoy our meal. And that is a tricky shift. But I think what it comes down to is thinking about how can I use structure to make sure my child is getting enough to eat and that they can trust their body and feel safe in their body. Instead of how do I put enough rules around the dinner table to get my kid to eat vegetables? With our son who's almost nine, we've really allowed him to have as much dessert as he

wants. And as a result, he doesn't have anything. I was at lunch with him just two days ago. And dessert came where we were with a bunch of his cousins, and they don't get much dessert, and they were going nuts, and my son didn't have any. Didn't, it was just not hungry. So that has really worked for our son. However, we still do,

at dinner time, say, like, you got to finish your cucumbers if you want dessert, or sometimes we'll say, don't leave the table, you know, just have a few cucumbers, please. But it sounds like that is something maybe we should drop. Well, you know your kid best. You know what's working or not working in your house. I think different kids respond to pressure differently. You are putting some pressure on him there. For sure, you're saying like, finish your cucumbers. Again, when we look at the research, the requirement to finish cucumbers does not teach a love of cucumbers. It teaches kids that cucumbers are the thing I have to get through in order to get to the thing I really want to do,

whether that's leave the table or have dessert or whatever. So if your goal is a child who loves cucumbers, I don't know that that's gonna get you there. However, is it like damaging your child, setting it up for a needing disorder, probably not in the larger framework of everything else you're telling me? I have one child who has to put food on her plate herself.

She will feel really pressured if I plate her meal for her. And I'm less so now, she's older. But like, for a lot of years, like if I was like, here's your dinner and it's all on a plate, she would kind of freak out and feel overwhelmed and not want to eat that food. Whereas I have another child who, if I say from the bowl on the table, do you want some of this?

She will always say no. But if it's just on her plate, she happily eats it and enjoys it. So, like, some of it is getting to know your own kids rhythms. She does well with a plated food. It's like fewer decisions. She's a little overwhelmed when I'm offering. Like, do you want this?

Do you want this? She's like, no, stop. That's too many choices. But if it's their great, you made decisions for me. But the other child needed a little more control of like, that's not going on my plate till I say it goes on my plate. And if bottom line, my goal is a kid who enjoys food on their own terms and feels safe and trusting of their body,

whether or not the cucumbers is sort of irrelevant to my mission. So that's why I'm taking this approach. But your mileage may vary. Feeding kids is hard. And we all have to try a lot of things. You've made a lot of points in the course of this discussion that I imagine are challenging for people talking about the roots of antifat bias,

talking about the fact that diets don't work and that we need to rethink how we're relating to our bodies, how we're relating to food, talking about how we feed our children and some of the ideas there about loosening restrictions, et cetera, et cetera. What would your smartest critic say about your various contentions. So, I think some of my smartest critics on this work have absolutely been other fat people and folks who live in fatter bodies than mine and deal with anti-fat bias in both a more chronic way

than I do and more nuanced to it for their lived experience. And I think it's been interesting as the conversation around ozampic has heated up. I think a lot of us in the fat activism community and the anti-diac community were very quick to say, this is a new way the industry is pushing weight loss on us. We don't need to fall for it.

This is the same old tactics. We've seen over and over what's happened with different weight loss drugs and that they kind of blow up as this big silver bullet and then it turns out they don't work and they cause terrible side effects and won't this be the same thing. We're making some really reasonable points there, for sure.

We have seen a lot of ups and downs with weight loss drugs and that they have a lot of promise and they don't deliver and they cause more problems than they cure. That said, because ozemic in particular is a diabetes medication, I am learning from lots of folks who live in bigger bodies and have diabetes or who live in bigger bodies and there's a lot of any time they go to the doctor's office diabetes is on the table.

I am learning from a lot of folks that like fat activists and anti-diaphoots coming out just like fully against ozampic is not actually helpful to what they're trying to do in terms of advocating for themselves in healthcare settings. It doesn't help them. If now every doctor assumes that every fat person doesn't want to take ozampic and is going to be really difficult and the doctors obviously are attempt to name our concerns about it, can have this sort of like ricochet effect of causing a doubling down of the bias.

And then we're doing the same thing that we're saying the other side is doing where we're making these judgments and assumptions about what's best for somebody's body. When I don't know, I don't live in that super fat body. I'm not pre-diabetic, I'm not navigating these numbers. Their health decisions are their health decisions. I think that's been a really helpful piece of this for me to understand. I think where a lot of us start, especially those of us who've had a fair amount of straight size privilege, we start with naming how harmful diets have been and

diet cultures been to us, then we start to understand anti-fap bias under pins at all. But there often is still this way the anti-fap bias shows up even for fat activists where we're assuming we know best for people or we want to make these broader claims in the discourse about what's good or bad, about a weight loss approach that's ignoring what might feel true and best for somebody in their individual life. You know, if my goal is to help eradicate anti-fabias, one really good way I can do that is keep listening to fat people about what's happening in their lives. And so that's that's been a useful learning curve for me in this past year, especially. Can you please before I let you go here, let everybody know again, the

name of your newsletter and the two books you've written and anything else you want us to know about? Sure. So my newsletter is burnt toast. It's on substack. And there's also the burnt toast podcast that goes along with that. That is wherever you are listening to this podcast. And my books are fat talk parenting in the edge of diet culture and the eating instinct food culture body image and guilt in America. And those are both available wherever you like to get books. Thank you Virginia, great job. Thank you so much.

This was wonderful. Thanks again to Virginia Solesmith, that was a fascinating discussion. If you missed our Monday episode on the Science of Eating with Dr. Judd Brewer, there's a link to that in the show notes. If you want to hear more about intuitive eating, we've put links to some of our past episodes on that topic in the show notes, as well as a conversation about exercise the one I mentioned with the great Dharma teacher Cara Lie. Thanks to you for listening. Don't forget our newsletter. You can sign up in the show notes.

Thank you most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin D'Avi, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere as our senior producer. Marissa Schneidermann as our senior editor, Kevin O'Connell as our director of audio and post-production. And Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackie leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts. Finally, Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and add free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

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