30: Fat Talk with Virginia Sole-Smith

Do you agree that we live in a world that equates body size with a person’s value? What is our society teaching our kids about fat, body size, and a person’s worth? If you experienced body-size shaming as you grew up, don’t you want to do a better job with your children? Parenting around these topics is not easy, and my guest today wrote a book to help us understand more. I’m excited for this conversation with Virginia Sole-Smith, author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and host of the Burnt Toast podcast. Join us to learn more!

Show Highlights:

• Why parents struggle with fears and concerns around their kids’ body sizes

• Why the goal is to have kids who don’t feel anxious about their relationship with food

• Why we need to think about health as MUCH more than a number on the scale

• Why, to embrace body diversity, we need to challenge what we’ve been trained to think about health, beauty, and morality

• How weight distribution matches up with “thin privilege” and anti-fat bias

• How focusing too closely on our personal weight struggles causes us to reinforce and perpetuate fat bias in the world

• How our children receive messaging around body types and sizes from healthcare providers, sports coaches, etc. 

• How to have healthy conversations with kids about bodies, fat, diets, etc. 

• Why parents need to give counter programming to the default settings our kids receive from society about topics such as body shaming and racism

• Why Virginia included in her book a chapter called “Straight White Dads on Diets”

 Resources:

Connect with Virginia Sole-Smith: Website, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Burnt Toast podcast, and Fat Talk book

Connect with KC: TikTok, Instagram, and Website 

Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning

We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes

• Transcript

  KC Davis 0:05

  Hello you sentient balls of stardust. Welcome to Struggle Care. I'm your host, KC Davis. I'm here with Virginia Cole-Smith. And she is an author. She's written a book called Fat Talk. And I got an Advanced Edition. And I'm so excited to have her here on the show today, hi Virigina. Yeah. Hi, thanks

  Virginia Cole-Smith 0:20

  for having me.

  KC Davis 0:21

  I loved your book. Okay. So let me I'll just read back so that people kind of get caught up, okay. Since by the time they reach kindergarten, most kids believe that fat is bad kids learn as we have all learned to pursue thinness and survive in a world out to survive thinness and a world that equates our body size with our value. And there's more here. And so in the subtitle is parenting in the age of diet culture, which is amazing. So I had to tell you that this book was so much more than I expected, because I am someone who I've been on my own journey with diet culture, and my relationship with food and all these things. And I do a lot consciously, to help cultivate a healthy relationship with my children to food. And main ways that I'm doing that now is like making sure I don't comment on their bodies, and implementing like a different way of approaching food, like we don't do clean your play, we don't do eat your broccoli before your dessert. And you talk about both of those things in your book as like, things that we maybe our parents did that aren't helpful, and you tell stories, and you give data to back that up. But what's so interesting to me was like, That is like the whole of the advice. And like the general conversation when you're reading blogs and listen to podcasts, like that's kind of where it stops when it comes to like thinking critically about how we were brought up around food. And I'm curious, like your book goes into so much more, we'll go into that. But I'm just curious if you have thoughts about like, why does it tend to stop there?

  Virginia Cole-Smith 1:51

  You're totally right, it does stop there. I think it's because those feel like two very actionable things that people can kind of wrap their brains around. But even more, I think it's because just making a simple rule of okay, I won't make them finish broccoli in order to have dessert, I can see the research that supports that. That's very cut and dried. That is great. It's important. I really do recommend people do it. But it doesn't ask you to reckon with your own anti-fat bias. It doesn't ask you to go deeper and think why am I pushing the broccoli so hard? Why does the broccoli matters so much? Why is the dessert so scary? Like, what is this actually about? And once you strip away, but it's actually about, it's about the fear that if you are a parent in a larger body, if you have a kid in a larger body, that society will treat you differently and worse than if you were thin. And that having a kid in a larger body especially is going to reflect back on you as the parent as some kind of failure. And so dealing with that, and like pulling up all that by like, oh, super uncomfortable, super hard to look at super difficult work a lot of unlearning, like, yeah, I get why a lot of the blogs and like the kid food, Instagram keeps it to like, Oh, don't make them finish the broccoli.

  KC Davis 3:06

  Yeah, and I also wonder if a part of it is like, every time I've read about like not restricting dessert, it's always about how because when you restrict dessert, dessert becomes taboo, and then it becomes wanted, and then that's what we crave. And we can't have moderation. And we talk a lot about how that can start binge eating or that can start quote unquote, overeating. And a part of me wonders if like in our effort to, like, give our kids a better relationship. Part of why that's like the advice is because we're hoping like, well, then maybe this will work for them to not eat too many Oreos.

  Virginia Cole-Smith 3:41

  Oh, I think that's a big part of it. I mean, very often the way that advice is framed, and I have been guilty of this, I have to be clear in my own content at times, is people will kind of hold up like the bag of Halloween candy a week later, that's still like overflowing with candy. Or, you know, the box of doughnuts that came in the house and your kid actually only one of them or whatever. And they'll be like, see, this is why getting easing up restriction is so great. Because look, my kids can take or leave sugar. And then where does that leave the parent of the kid who actually is always gonna want three doughnuts, and always is going to be the kid who eats their Halloween candy all in one city. And that's just how they're wired. And we don't actually need to demonize that either. And so it's really important to understand that like, actually, the goal for this kind of advice is not to have a kid who has like no emotions in the face of sugar and never craved a cupcake and couldn't like, totally take it or leave it. The goal is just to have a kid who does not feel anxious and frocked about their love of these foods that they can just enjoy them. Like, Yay, it's cupcake time. I'm having one cupcake or four cupcakes, whatever I'm actually feeling in the moment, and then I can move on with my day and nobody made me feel like shit about it and I don't have to feel a whole bunch of complicated feelings about the cupcakes. I can just like have that joy in the cupcake and whatever that looks like for me, which is gonna vary for all of us on any given day,

  KC Davis 5:03

  and you do a good job in the beginning of your book of laying out that for all of the concern we have about our children's physical health, that like fatphobia kind of gets mingled with that, you know, there is a real damaging effect to their mental and emotional and physical health through things like restricting putting kids on diets, making these kinds of body comments to our kids. Because it's not just like, oh, let's do it this way. Because I'm being virtuous. It's like, oh, no, like, if we really cared about our kids health, like we wouldn't be doing these things.

  Virginia Cole-Smith 5:42

  Yeah, no, that's completely apt. We know that the number one risk factor for eating disorders is weight based shaming, and dieting in childhood. And a lot of the way we're taught to engage with kids around food and bodies is both of those things at once. So we really need to reckon with like if health is truly your priority, and so often, health is sort of a dog whistle, it's kind of a coded word for like, actually, I just prefer it than this. But if you're like, No, no, it really is about health, then you have to think about health as much more than just a number on a scale or point on the growth chart, you have to think about health as mental well being emotional health, felt safety, all these other things that really matter and really impact this and the impact the physical health outcomes as well. So it's much more comprehensive way of thinking about kids and health and food. And it's just removing so much shame. It's removing so much pressure. And when you step out of it, it's sort of wild to think that people think that the other way is going to be health promoting, like how would making someone feel like they can't trust their body and can't trust themselves around food and that their body is a problem to solve, like, how would that promote health. And yet that is, like so many of our systems and larger culture built on that model.

  KC Davis 6:59

  I want to read this little excerpt here, it's in the very beginning, an introduction, you say unlearning this core belief about the importance of thinness means deciding that thin bodies and fat bodies have equal value. To do this, you have to know that humans have always come in a variety of sizes, that body diversity is both beautiful and necessary, you have to believe that being fat isn't a bad thing. And that means you have to challenge a lot of what you think you knew about health, beauty and morality. That was such a beautiful passage, because you do this thing in the book where you say, like, Hey, this is like the part of this that's just like, right, in a moral sense, like bringing more justice into the world. And then you also speak to us as parents, when it comes to like, Hey, this is like how to actually promote health with our children. But you also like you don't stop there, you actually go and you have data, and you have the research and you dissect why it is that we think that fat must equal unhealthy and skinny must equal healthy, and you give really good data for that. And I think that's really cool. And then in that I'm going to flip pages, you're gonna hear it the whole time. Here's what I thought was so amazing about this book, like I wrote some notes. I'm all over the place today, but my listeners are used to it. Okay.

  Virginia Cole-Smith 8:16

  I love the notes. I love the flipping.

  KC Davis 8:19

  Okay, so I feel like so for listeners who have never maybe seen me, I am five, two, I'm currently like, maybe 160 pounds. Over the past two years, I have been in the 160 to 180 pound range. And as someone who's five to like, you know, I'm in this weird spot, okay. And I don't consider myself someone who is skinny. And I don't consider myself someone who is fat with a capital F. And what I mean by that is, I don't experience the discrimination and the bias in the medical field. In the social arena. I don't get harassed on airplanes, like I don't experience the kind of discrimination that fat people experienced that are in larger bodies than mine. And what I loved about this book was there were several points that I read, where I really realized, Oh, my God, you have pinpointed how anti fat bias in our culture has harmed me, has hurt me as a child, and has created all sorts of issues in my own relationship to food and my own health and my own sort of relationships there. And one thing that you talked about a couple of times that I've never seen anyone talk about before, and I'm sure they do, and I just have never been exposed to it, but you specifically talked about weight distribution.

  Virginia Cole-Smith 9:40

  Yeah, so that's the concept of Aaron, Harrop, I think is the source in the book, who elucidated that really well for me, and they talk about how, depending how your weight is distributed, you may have more or less thin privilege than someone of an equal body size than you so and I hate this terminology, it comes from women's magazines, which is also where I come from. So I have a lot of feelings about it. But I am someone who has an apple shape for lack of a less ridiculous term. You know, I am I wear plus sizes, I identify as small fat, which is again, in reference of the fact that I don't experience the more extreme forms of fat discrimination, I can fit into an airplane seat, like public spaces are built for me, I can order clothes, I have to mostly shop online in person stores not so much. But like I can get clothes that fit my body, I definitely do experience some weight stigma doctor's offices, like it comes up in different ways. But I have a lot of thin privilege. But having that Apple shaped body means that someone else who's my same way with the hourglass figure is going to have a different set of privileges and ability to access clothes, because their body is much closer to the thin ideal, or the sort of larger beauty ideals we have, which is that like, you know, you can have curves if they're in the quote, right places, but not the wrong places. So yeah, that's the weight distribution piece of that. And it is really fascinating to sort of see it also often intersects quite a lot with class and with race and interesting ways. And so all of these different aspects of fatness, you know, become these kinds of intersecting identities with whatever other marginalization you might hold. And yeah, you know, I mean, and then on the flip side, I'll say like, even though I'm an apple shape, I'm also someone who like, has skinny legs and like skinny or skinny face, that's a weird term, but like, so there's also ways that like, when I post a picture on Instagram, I might present as thinner than I present in a doctor's office. So this is where it can get really maddening. Because you can feel like your body is like this sort of moving target, if you are so focused entirely on like how to other people perceive it. And how does this enable me to move through the world? And I think what's important to take away from that is like, it's of course useful to sort of understand it for ourselves. But it is most important to understand it in the context of the spectrum of fatness. And to sort of take it in, sort of analyze where it shows up in your own life, but then think, Okay, where am I benefiting? And who is not benefiting? When I'm benefiting? You know, who's being pushed out? Because we prize thin rest are small phenolic, all these other weird things that like fall into, you know, how this shows up? And so I just think that's yeah, it can feel like you're really down the rabbit hole. But it's also like definitely happening all the time.

  KC Davis 12:24

  No, that's exactly my experience. And reading your book was, I felt like you pointed out ways in which I had never had articulated that, like, I never was a kid that struggled with weight. But I have always struggled with weight distribution, I felt like my body wasn't the right shape. And so pin connecting that to anti fat bias and some other things was kind of a moment for me of going, Oh, this is how anti fat bias has affected me. But at the same time, he did a really good job of routing me kind of understanding like where I am on the continuum of harm, intersecting with where I am on the continuum of privilege. So I am sort of in that space where the primary impact of anti fat bias in our culture creates emotional distress for me, but with the exception of maybe like mean online comments, like, which is still emotional distress. I don't experience barriers to parts of society that kind of said this early, right. Like I've never been discriminated against for health care. I have never had someone tell me that I can't ride a park ride that I've never had someone discriminate against me for a job, which we know that data shows that fat people are discriminated against for jobs. And so that was really helpful because it was like, okay, validating, totally cool to recognize like where your own wounds are, and important to recognize I am not the one most harmed by this and that this is a systemic justice issue, not just a personal self esteem issue.

  Virginia Cole-Smith 14:00

  Yeah, and I think that's where a lot of the online discourse really loses the plot. I mean, I just did a whole thing on my newsletter about the mid size queen trend on Tik Tok. And it's a lot of straight size women embracing their midsize status, which is to say they're not assigned to, and sort of talking about how this creates perceived barriers for them. But we just have to step back and say like, your personal struggle is real and valid. And you're, you know, any one of us feeling like we don't feel safe in our bodies, like we deserve that safety. We deserve to work on that, and to be, you know, supported through that. But when we leave the conversation there with the struggle of the sort of emotional struggles specifically of thin to small, fat white women, we are really ignoring this larger constellation of issues, and who is really being harmed the most by this and I would also say like for me personally, and I don't know if this will resonate with you, is really helped me let go of my own shit to understand the larger spectrum of this because I don't want to be that weight lady, you know, I don't want to be like pushing other people out of the conversation and centering myself over and over. Like, I can see the harm that causes and so that makes it sound then feel like an act of radical self acceptance, but also a form of social justice and form of activism to say, I'm going to wear you know, like, right now I'm wearing like a sports bra, and my stomach is out. And I am totally, like, fuck that beauty standard. And also, like, that's great for me personally. But that's also like some work I can do on myself that's like, on behalf of this larger thing, I don't want to be a part of that system.

  KC Davis 15:37

  Well, I think it taps into, like, a lot of what my audience resonates with, which is like, we talk a lot about like, Why do I struggle so badly to care for myself, but then I can go do all those same tasks for someone else. And I'm with you, like all of the areas where like, despite really trying to unpack fatphobia, and anti fat bias for myself, and like getting to a place of acceptance for my body, like some of that stuff just won't budge, right? Like, at the end of the day, it's like, just there. However, when I think about what me existing in the world without trying to change myself, how that can push dialogue, social change atmosphere, like how that can push it forward, it's like it's easier to care for others more than for yourself, right. And so I think that that was cool as a parent reading that because you're right, what you said at the beginning, which is like we have to unpack our own stuff while trying to avoid giving it to our kids. Oh, I know what I was gonna say. The other thing that I think is really helpful about the way you rooted us in that intersection of privilege and discrimination, or bias is that a lot of times what I've seen with that mid size, and I guess mid size is what I would say I am as well, is that when we're not aware of what anti-fat bias really is and what it looks like and we're up rooting that we end up using, like the ways in which we try to soothe ourselves and heal ourselves and tell ourselves we're okay. ended up hurting people that are fatter than us. Yes. Yeah. Like we ended up saying, you know, I'm not fat. This is just how like women's bodies were meant to look, we're supposed to have fat around our belly. And it's like, Well, okay, but like some people are fat,

  Virginia Cole-Smith 17:24

  or fat. Yeah, you're still making fat. The thing to avoid this comes up all the time, when I hear from my readers, I'll get these furious emails from parents, because they've just been to the pediatrician. And the pediatrician made a big fuss about their child having a high percentile on the growth chart. And they'll be like, it's so discriminated Tory, it's so wrong, blah, blah, blah. And he's not even fat. Meaning like, this is happening to my like, stocky, athletic kid or my tall daughter, you know, who's big boned. And like, how terrible. It's like, no, not what's terrible about this BMI, what's terrible about the way we you know medicalized way that what you've just experienced is like a tiny taste of what fat people are experiencing. And that's what's terrible. What's terrible is the way that gets weaponized against fat people. And you were just saying me that you don't want your kid to be in the fat kid club. And so that's another way of and that's what it really comes down to is when we stayed too focused on our own personal struggles. Without this larger awareness of our privilege, and the system we're operating in, we will only end up reinforcing and perpetuating the bias more, because we aren't seeing who's not there.

  KC Davis 18:29

  Great. Okay, let's take a quick break for a word from a sponsor, and then we'll come back. Okay, so we've talked about like, kind of some heavy stuff. And you do like, again, you firmly root us in the bigger picture. But you don't stop there. Like, it's not just this heavy read, like you give really practical advice. And one of the things that I think is helpful is that you talk about how much of an impact us talking to our children, about bodies, about their bodies, about other bodies. And there are lots of things that I think we would recognize as harmful. But I think you do a good job of saying even like innocuous comments that you think you're making, that is no big deal, like, are creating these issues, and you do a really great job of once again, making this a book that is not just for parents of fat children, like you talk at length about how this paradigm harms even thin children who will always be thin. And I wanted to just read this little part that you have, okay, and it says, When the adults in my life told me that I can eat as many treats as I wanted as a thin kid. While policing themselves I learned that I was getting away with something there was a certain thrill. But it also gave those foods more power, which made me more obsessive about wanting to eat them. And when I did say eat an entire box of fudge in one afternoon and didn't immediately gain weight. It reinforced my sense that fitness was some sort of innate superpower that I could eat whatever I wanted without gaining weight and was therefore superior to people who couldn't thinness gradually became wrapped up in my sense of self as a talented and successful person. It felt deeply tied to my other achievements, like getting good grades and winning my High School's playwriting competition three years in a row, even though those were goals that I had worked for, and my childhood body size required no such effort. This made it much more difficult to come to terms with my less than and later small, fat adult body. Because I wasn't just buying bigger clothing sizes. I was untangling my identity from thinness, even though the roles that make up my identity now, what writer mother obsessive gardener should not have a body type that is, to me was one of the more powerful things because I resonated with it, I understood it. And it helped me and thinking about talking to my children getting away from this, well, we just don't want to hurt fat people. And it's like, no, we don't want to hurt anyone. And like everyone is really harmed by this. So I thought that was really interesting, because you also talk about how you can engage with medical providers to protect your children from that kind of stigma that kind of weighed, taught that kind of fat talk, and how we should re examine sports for children and how that can be a breeding ground for this kind of messaging. Because it's true that like, there's only so much that we can do with our children, but like the world has an influence. So we need to know how to integrate in whatever that word is. Last point, I have heard so much advice about how to talk to my children about bodies in a good way. You're the first person that I've heard talk about how to teach my children how to think critically about the way society talks about bodies. And it just hit me like, oh, that's the much more important thing that I need to be doing with my kids. The story about the brothers and they were calling one of their brothers, a fat idiot. And the mom says, you know, why do you say that? What do you notice about fat people? What do you notice about why that's an insult? And it was like a lightbulb moment?

  Virginia Cole-Smith 21:52

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many layers to this. But I think what often happens is, once parents start reckoning with oh my gosh, diet culture is everywhere. Oh my gosh, anti fat bias is everywhere. You of course want to protect your kid, right? And so you think like, How can I keep them in a bubble? How can I and you know, I'll get emails like, I'm not gonna let my three year old watch Peppa Pig anymore because they make jokes about Daddy Pig's tummy. And I'm like, I agree. It's really annoying that you can't watch a cartoon with your toddler and not having anti fat bias show up. Like I also cringe at the daddy pig scenes. But what if instead, it was a chance to be like, Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with Daddy Pigs. Tell me why is Peppa being so mean to her dad? What do you think? And like, just start having those conversations? And like, Absolutely. When I did it with my three year old, it was like, blank stares, what? I don't know, you know, like we didn't. It's not like my child responded with a thoughtful dialogue about, but now that that child is almost 10, I am having her. You know, she brought me her iPad recently, she was playing some like penguin Island game on her iPad. She was like, Mama, check this out. And it was an ad that popped up in the middle of this children's video game for keto weight loss drugs. And she was like, What is this doing here? And again, I had the instinct of like, I want to like throw your iPad into the sea, like, this is why video games, you know, like I had that I just want to protect you from her. But I like took a deep breath. And I was like, Oh, what do you think of that? What are you seeing here? And now it's become this great thing. Whenever that ad pops up on her game, she brings it over? And she's like, can you believe it says expert approved? What experts approving these trucks? How? Why are they thinking kids should take this, you know, and like it's become this opportunity to build skills. And so and I want to be clear, like my parenting is often incredibly flawed. And this is like one victory I've had in the last six months that I'm really dining out on. So don't think of all the answers because I don't. But on that front, I feel like okay, we're building some skills. And both my kids have thin privilege right now. They are in straight size bodies. And I still know how important it is to be interrogating this with them, because they may very well take after me and not always be straight sized. Or they may take after my husband and be straight size forever, you know, Jury's out. Either way, I don't want them to think that thinness is pivotal to their identity, that thinness is something they have to fight to hold on to. I want them to not live because if you think about it, like fitness, and fatness only exist in opposition to one another, as long as we're continuing to pit them against each other. That's where all of these issues come from. And so the more we can do to use fat as a positive term, you know, they're used to me describing myself as fat. They don't think fat is a bad word. It's used in a totally innocuous way in our household all the time. That's what I'm trying to work towards so that it doesn't feel like the scary thing. And again, the rest of the world is out there. They're going to encounter the anti-fat bias in all of the different ways they encounter it. But they're developing the skills to question that and to reckon with that. Another thing I'll say is like even if you have 10 kids, it's important to talk about this stuff. The same way white parents need to talk about racism, right? We need to talk about anti blackness because when we don't do it, we are going to raise kids who have the you know, the culture will fill in the gaps for you. And you want to be out there. Yeah, they're gonna get the default setting, right? And we want to, we want to give some counter programming to the default settings and help them build those skills.

  KC Davis 25:10

  So I know that if someone's listening, and they're maybe hearing this for the first time, or they're, you know, they're maybe they're not as exposed to this kind of push back on diet culture, I'm sure that there is welling up in them that fear of what about their health? What about their health? I don't want us to go into that. Because that's, that can be a whole podcast, there's a lot of resources, I just wanted to bring it up to say that you do address that in the book, like what about their health, like you do a very good job of that. Here's really the last question that I wanted to ask you. In this conversation, I noticed that I am thinking a lot about moms and mothers, even when you say how parents talk to their kids in my head is like moms and mothers, the conversation in the culture is dominated by I used to see my mom talk negatively about her body, or my mom used to always point out my weight, my mom put me on a diet. And there's this really huge emphasis on the impact that moms being screwed up by diet culture, screw up their kids. And that's why I thought that it was so fascinating and amazing. When I got to your chapter, chapter nine, that's called straight white dads on diets. And so can you just talk to us for a minute about this chapter? Why did you include this chapter? And what is this chapter about?

  Virginia Cole-Smith 26:27

  Yeah, I included this chapter. Because exactly as you say, the default setting is to think this is entirely moms and daughters that show. So I also made sure throughout the book to include some stories from boys as well so and gender queer kids like I tried to include a diversity of genders just throughout the book, and kind of a more natural way that I decided we needed a chapter on dads, because I don't think we talk nearly enough about how much damage dads can do in this conversation. And it plays out in a couple of different ways. And I want to be really clear, I'm not shaming any parent in this. I mean, I also talk a lot in the book about how mothers are unfairly blamed. And given all the responsibility for our kids bodies, and like that really needs to change. So I'm not saying like, Okay, now we need to blame dads instead, like everyone's fault. I'm saying, I don't think our culture is giving men like against us straight white men in particular, but all men in some ways, I don't think they're being given a script for how to talk about their bodies in a way that would let them do this work. And so what that plays out as is, men doing things like CrossFit, or counting macros, or doing intermittent fasting, like there is a male diet culture diets that are marketed to men, that is distinct from the diet culture we see marketed to women often. And it's given a kind of gravitas that a lot of the diets are marketed to women are not given in quite the same way. It's often like more science backed and it's, you know, it's people like Jack Dorsey like he's a billionaire tech CEO, talking about intermittent fasting, or, you know, it's these doctors. It's Michael Pollan, who has been given like about like, optimizing yourself as a human. Right, right. And like you're doing it in this like smart, very, like Brainiac kind of way. But it's the same, it's the same thing. At the end of the day, it's rooted in anti fat bias. And all those diets do is teach restriction, which is everything every woman learned in Weight Watchers, it's the same goddamn thing. And I think stripping that back is so important, because when we're giving men only that language to talk about bodies, they then can't talk about the feelings, right? They can't, they don't have the scripts for talking about hating their bodies, and how that's making it hard to function or do you know, the distress that's causing, they're only sort of staying in this very, like, you know, practical, I have to do XY and Z to achieve this body and maintain my body way. And we really see the fallout of that on kids, because they're, of course, you know, looking up to their dad, just like they look up to their mom, they're getting this model set this template aside. And the other piece of it that I think is really interesting is how gendered our labor around food is so that in most heterosexual relationships, it's often the mom who's running point on the feeding and the meal prep, and the cooking and all of that. And that means she's more likely to have started to do some of this work. Because if she's following food influencers, and you know, she's gonna start reckoning with diet culture there. And then meanwhile, the dads are less engaged, right? They're not judged by how their kids eat in the same way. They don't have the same pressure on them. But it means they're not really engaging with this conversation. So then they're showing up to the dinner table and being like, No, you do have to finish your broccoli to have the cookie and not and like expecting that to be given some weight and authority when they aren't actually like they don't have receipts to back that up. And I just think that's also another layer to this that we need, in particular heterosexual men to be taking a much more active role in the labor of family feeding and like management of family bodies and all of this labor and And we need to be working towards being able to have conversations where they can do their own emotional work around.

  KC Davis 30:05

  Yes. Whenever I talk about care tasks, and cleaning, one of the issues that comes up is when it's almost always women that say, this will say, like, I just can't sit down and relax if the house is messy, and there are just certain like seasons of life where like, you can't like if if you never sit down unless the house is perfectly clean, you'll never sit down. And one of the things that I talk about a lot is how I believe that there are lots of women out there with undiagnosed generalized anxiety disorders, because the way in which they are carrying out those anxiety behaviors is culturally accepted for women. Like it's acceptable for a woman to never sit down for her always to be about cleaning for her, you know, and sometimes it's like jokey, and there's a difference between like, Oh, I like to Potter, I have ADHD. And the joke about like, mom never gets through a whole movie, she has to get up and fold laundry. Right, right. And because like, it's socially acceptable for women to be anxious, even in distress and pain, as long as the way they're carrying that out is like cleaning the home. And I feel like this, in some ways, mirrors that like, this is the way like men, I feel like are massively under diagnosed when it comes to eating disorders. Because so many times their disordered eating habits show up as socially acceptable gendered behavior, like you said, like masked as this, like, I'm just optimizing my mind and body and I'm counting my macros, and I'm getting stronger.

  Virginia Cole-Smith 31:39

  I'm training for an Ironman, you know, like, I'm just a triple sport athlete. And that's a normal thing for a 46 year old man to like, I mean, it's not that it's not normal, but like, what about the larger? Like, what about the work that goes into that, and the amount of mental bandwidth that takes for you to do and yeah,

  KC Davis 31:56

  and there's an interesting intersection between those two people when they marry each other. Because what happens is that she becomes very angry that she's carrying the whole load of the house. And he is leaving for four hours every Saturday to go bike. Yep. And so it's this combination of, you know, yes, I'm over burdened as the woman but also some of the overburdening, I'm giving myself because I can't relax and everything's perfect. And then he's in this space of like, yeah, like, I'm kind of avoiding. I'm going biking, you know, and so I should be here for my family. But it's like this, the idea that, like, I can just leave my family to do this without, you know, a reciprocal conversation for four hours. Because leaving to do this healthy thing is like the trump card. Like, who could argue with that I'm going to exercise when it's like, Ooh, maybe there's something else more obsessive going on.

  Virginia Cole-Smith 32:59

  Right? Why are you exercising at that level? Like, what is this? What need is this meeting? And why does it feel similarly? Like, why can you not just sit down? You know, like, it's another version of that I can't sit down until the house is clean. Like I can't I talked to men who are like, one guy in the book, who was like, I can't relax. It's 9pm at night, and I haven't closed my ring on my Apple Watch. I'm gonna go for a run. Like, that's something that's something to look at. But, you know, that's, I mean, he identified it as an obsession. And I think that feels pretty right. But yeah, because especially because it's Amanda. And you know, and you think if your teenage daughter was doing that, you might be like, Oh, I don't know, if my teenage daughter is going out for runs at nine or 10 o'clock at night, I'd be worried. But I'm not worried if her dad does that,

  KC Davis 33:39

  or like your 14 year old going to spend four hours on the treadmill, right? But he's

  Virginia Cole-Smith 33:44

  training for a marathon. So it's fine. Like, and I just want to be clear, because probably there's a lot of like marathon people listening who now want to like, send me hate mail. Like, I'm not saying you can't have a healthy relationship with Rene. I'm saying, in general, in our culture, we are not interrogating these things. And it shows up in a you know, there's things that show up that are worth looking at.

  KC Davis 34:05

  Yeah, I think that's interesting, especially when you find yourself putting that it's not like, you know, biking for four hours is bad. But if you're beginning to put it above priority over other things that maybe should be the higher priority. That's when the conversation happens. Okay, so just to wrap up the book is fat talk, the fat talk parenting in the age of diet culture. The author is Virginia soul Smith, and when does the book come out? It is out

  Virginia Cole-Smith 34:31

  April 25. So anywhere you buy books, there's also the audiobook version is out. And the UK, Australia and New Zealand edition will be out around the same time. So yeah, you can get it anywhere you buy books. And you know, you can also follow me on my substack newsletter, Bert toast, which is at Virginia soul smith.substack.com or subscribe to the burnt toast podcast and I'm on Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok although I am not as good at Tik Tok as KC and all of those is at V underscore colesmith. So,

  KC Davis 35:03

  come hang out. Amazing. Thank you again, thank you for sending me the book and go out and get this book or read it or you know, listen to it while you're doing your care tasks. I feel like it is a really helpful resource for parents.

  Virginia Cole-Smith 35:17

  Thank you. That means so much