Are the Boomer Moms OK?

Q: My Boomer mom eats extremely tiny portions of food. I know I need to mind my own plate, but sometimes I can’t help asking if she’s had enough to eat, to which she often says something about “older people not needing as much food.” She is also cold all the time and also says it’s just part of “being old.” I’ve heard my mother-in-law say similar things. 

Is it true that older people have smaller appetites? I can’t help but feel like it’s just a guise for restriction and that they are cold all the time because they are hungry! But that might just be my own triggers talking? 

I’m not a doctor and I can’t say what’s happening, exactly, with your mom and her body, or her relationship to food. But I do want to talk more generally about these questions because “my Boomer mom eats like a bird” is a theme that comes up so frequently when I interview Millennials and Gen X folks about their own relationship to food. I think I also got a question about this at every event and interview for Fat Talk. And we see #BoomerMom heavily referenced on TikTok, as part of the larger Almond Mom discourse, of course, but also as its own specific phenomenon. See: Kristen Marie who regularly explores this half a clementine approach to life.

@callmekristenmarieIts thebhalf eaten clementine in the fridge for me #boomermom #midwestmom

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These videos are funny in a painfully true way—there are so many women, of all ages, rubbing salt off their crackers. But they are also embedded with ageism because they poke fun at behaviors that, if your teenage daughter engaged in them, would not be funny at all. But what we diagnose as eating disordered in thin, white girls, we ignore or reinforce in almost every other population. And so: We have normalized the idea that Boomer women don’t eat. And while I know you’re asking if this should be normal and what to do about it if it isn’t, it’s important to approach these questions with as much compassion as possible. This isn’t about being exasperated with how diety the Boomer moms can be. It’s about understanding why they only feel safe using butter spray in place of real butter; why they still aren’t convinced about eggs; why they might feed other people so joyfully, even aggressively, and yet skip lunch so often themselves. It’s about learning to sit with their discomfort with our own appetites and not internalize it—or repeat that same pattern with our kids’ appetites. And it’s about finding that ever-shifting line for ourselves between compassion and boundaries.

I’ve written before about why the grandparents are not okay, so I won’t unpack the whole history of Boomer diet culture here. (But if you haven’t read that piece, definitely do for context.) Instead, I turned to two wise Boomer women who are more qualified than me to answer these questions: Debra Benfield, RDN, a dietitian who specializes in the intersection of ageism and anti-fatness, and previously joined me on the podcast. And my mom, Marian.

Both Debra and Marian agree that smaller appetites and coldness are common among older folks—and both agree that “common” here doesn’t mean “normal and okay.” “It’s an accepted trope that you gain weight after menopause, and doctors always push weight loss,” Marian says. “Some of us accept the weight gain and some of us return to diet fixes.” My mom and her best friend always know which of their friends are restricting because the portions at their dinner parties are “miniscule.” One of their friends doesn’t exactly restrict portions but does want her kitchen to stay so immaculate that if you bring a dessert to share, she rushes it off to her bathroom instead of letting your dish sit scandalously on her kitchen island. And so she hosts meals where food is framed mostly as an unwelcome interruption. Martha Stewart has been a complicated role model for Boomer women on a lot of levels.

Debra confirms that “metabolism decreases, especially as we pass the 60-year mark, regardless of our activity and body composition.” But she adds: “It is also true that one of the biggest contributors to lower metabolism is not eating enough to meet our bodies’ needs.” At the core of this, of course, is anti-fat bias and ageism, again. Because menopause-related weight gain is framed as a failure and a fate to be avoided at all costs, Boomer women are vulnerable to diet culture mandates to eat less, in much the same way postpartum women are told that “getting our bodies back” should be our number one priority. “I just want to feel like myself again,” is what we say as we embark on a new workout plan or stop eating carbs again, at both of these life stages. But what if we didn’t tie our understanding of ourselves so closely to appearance? What if we were allowed to change as people and as bodies, and not experience that as “letting ourselves go?”

These aren’t easy questions to answer because, as my mom points out, so much of the pressure around weight loss post-menopause comes from the healthcare system. “So many doctors are fine just putting you in the ‘senior box,’” Marian says. “That means hearing over and over that you need to lose weight to get your blood pressure down and avoid diabetes.” For a deep dive into why weight loss isn’t an evidence-based or health-promoting prescription for either of those concerns, check out ’s reporting on how dieting can increase hypertension and insulin resistance, as well her work on weight-neutral, non-restrictive approaches to blood pressure management and blood sugar management.

On the “why are Boomers always cold” question, both Debra and my mom pushed back a little bit. “I’m always way colder than your family,” Marian texted. “The older you get, the more you seem to need sweaters when younger people don’t.” Debra says this “is a symptom of a lower metabolic rate,” which may just be a byproduct of aging. “There are other potential contributors like changes in circulation, medication side effects and symptoms of other disease processes,” Debra explains. “Restriction may or may not be a contributing factor.”

So maybe we set the cold thing to one side (and turn up the thermostat a little bit when they visit). But if you’re really worried about how little your mom eats, you can tell her. “Speaking up and expressing love and concern is worthwhile regardless of age,” says Debra. “It is never too late.” You are right to avoid a critique of her eating habits, which will just make her defensive. But you can start by talking more broadly about how much you hate the messages we get to eat less as we age. Share what you are learning about the harm of diet culture and anti-fatness. Ask her about her experiences of ageism, about the messages she gets about her body. Be a safe place she can vent, instead of another person for whom she has to perform her body and her eating habits.

I know that’s likely complicated by the way your mom’s body commentary makes you feel about your body—because for many mothers and daughters, that all gets woven together. But start teasing apart the strands. Model your own unapologetic love of food. And if she balks, maybe that’s your moment to say, “Eating this way brings me a lot of joy, and I worry when I see you depriving yourself. Because I think you deserve this kind of joy too.” She might shut it down, but she also might surprise you. “You are never too old to heal your relationship with eating, movement and you body,” says Debra. “Our hearts and brains are capable of change until the very end.”

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PS. Debra is offering a free online workshop on aging with body liberation — today at 12pm ET.

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You Asked: Is the AMA finally renouncing BMI?

Last week at its annual conference, the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates voted to adopt a policy naming a whole bunch of problems with BMI — that it has a history of causing harm, that it has been used for racist exclusion, and that “BMI cutoffs are based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations and does not consider a person’s gender or ethnicity.”

When I first saw the headline, I thought, “Holy shit, did we do it?!” A mainstream medical organization denouncing BMI is the essential first step towards the weight-inclusive paradigm shift we so desperately need here (and everywhere).

But then I read the rest of the press release, and realized: We did not do it. In fact, we might now be making things worse.

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Whatever the reason, whenever I start getting three, five, fifteen versions of the same question in a month, I know it’s time to talk about the thing. And this month, that thing is kids and weight, which lots of you are feeling stumped by. Of course, we talk about navigating anti-fat bias with kids all the time here. But that doesn’t mean we know how to talk to kids about weight (their weight, our weight, anyone’s weight). And I’ve picked these two questions, from the many variations on this theme that we receive, because they so perfectly encapsulate a common way I see folks responding in the moment to kids’ questions about weight: By freezing up and trying to answer perfectly. Which only ensures we respond in ways that feel deeply imperfect.

This is a lingering diet culture mentality, of course. Maybe you’re still working through your own discomfort talking about weight, so these questions trigger your own anti-fatness. Or maybe it’s not so much about the fatness, and more about how you still crave solutions that break down into three easy steps and gold stars for getting them all right. But you don’t have to have the perfect response every time your child mentions weight or fatness or bodies. Our kids can see us get this wrong and try again and learn alongside them and from them.

So I am going to suggest what to say to kids when weight comes up—in the case of these two questions either because you have to weigh them for a mundane reason like car seat sizing and want to make sure it doesn’t get weird, or because they asked and then it definitely got weird. But remember, this is much less about memorizing a perfect response and much more about just making sure the conversation happens in the first place.

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Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider, and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

Q: I'd like to know your thoughts on what to do when kids call each other fat. I teach 5-year-olds and it happens sometimes. Often they are calling children fat who are actually very thin but seem to just think it's an insult. I usually say there's nothing wrong with being fat and it's not nice to talk about people's bodies. I know this is not ideal but what else? Advice please! 

I think you’re actually pretty close. There is nothing wrong with being fat and it’s not nice to talk about people’s bodies. And 5-year-olds can hold both of those truths together. But I think rather than focusing so much on how to respond in the moment, it might help to step back and think about what you can do to incorporate these values more broadly into your classroom culture. 

I’m curious, for example, to know how you (or your school) handle it if a 5-year-old says a racist or homophobic slur. If there’s a process in place for that, I’d want it to be invoked for weight-based teasing or shaming as well. I don’t necessarily mean these kids should be punished; 5 is old enough to understand that they’re using a word to be hurtful, but not old enough to have a working knowledge of the entire complex history of any offensive term. But there should be conversations around why it’s harmful to use physical characteristics as insults and to weaponize someone’s appearance against them, and maybe some kind of restorative justice process between the child who did the insulting and the recipient. 

This goes beyond response mode though. How can you incorporate more body diversity in your classroom in terms of the books, videos and other materials you use? Can you start using the word fat as a neutral descriptor, so when the next kid tries to use it as an insult, everyone already knows that, in this space at least, it isn’t one? 

I want to be clear that I know you, and all teachers, are already overworked and at capacity and I know I’m asking you to take on yet more work, which may feel especially fraught if it’s not supported by your administration or by the parents of your students. But I do think there can be small wins here. When it was my turn to be the Mystery Reader for my own 5-year-old’s class this year, I brought in Tyler Feder’s Bodies Are Cool, and the kids got so into chanting “bodies are cool!” on every page and in talking about all the cool bodies we saw.

It was a more subversive choice than I realized: Tyler tweeted recently about how some parents react to seeing her book in schools. It’s not great, and, depressingly, helps explain why kids are still using “fat” as an insult in the first place. But we can do better — and I’m so grateful you’re thinking about this. 

Q: I have a toddler and he loves food! I recently had to explain that he couldn’t just eat strawberries for dinner because he needed some protein, which has led to a routine of explaining the various nutrients in each part of our meals (Protein helps you be strong! Carbs give you energy!). 

I was hoping to get him a book to dive deeper into this, but holy diet culture Batman, it’s wild out here. I just want a neutral presentation of facts, like “blueberries have Vitamin C, which helps your body fight germs,” not “carbohydrates killed my family.” Being a little dramatic over here, but I didn’t think this would be so hard! Any suggestions?

My suggestion—which may surprise you— is to stop trying to teach your toddler about nutrition.

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Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider, and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

Q: I'm wondering if you've heard of the "new" midsize trend (I'm thinking of that sound on Instagram that goes "Okay, so I'm a midsize queen...") and if you have any thoughts about it. I am what would be considered a "midsize" person and it can be uncomfortable to be in this space because I often feel like I'm in between straight-size and plus-size populations. For instance, straight-size brands usually go up to a large, which doesn't quite fit how I want it to, but the smaller end of the plus-size clothing also doesn't quite fit. And finding jeans is similarly tough. Why can't stores just carry all the sizes? The gap is frustrating! 

On one hand I feel very seen by the midsize description because I have felt so out of place most of my life, but on the other hand, it just seems silly to have to qualify it that way. 

Let’s start this column out with a content warning. I’m going to have to link to TikTok. A lot. And specifically to #midsizefashion TikTok which is a world I was blissfully unaware of until a few months ago and now I can never unsee what I’ve seen. Click through at your own risk, friends. We’re about to go on a dark and wild ride. 

First, a definition: You are correct that “midsize” sure sounds like it would refer to bodies that fall into the gray area between straight and plus size clothing. And yes, this can be a frustrating place to shop, as Dacy Gillespie (literally, a professional shopper! And so, so good at it!) explained in a recent video. Retail garment fit is an opaque and inexact science, and if you’re the upper end of straight sizes and lower end of plus sizes, you’re likely to be fairly far off the dimensions of the fit models used by most brands, in both categories.  

But this gray area is so gray that it’s difficult to get a clear definition of which sizes might even fall into the “midsize” no man’s land. According to “midsizequeen,” the original audio trending on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and also a kind of uber text for this discourse, “midsize” is sizes 8 to 16. According to the New York Times, the modeling industry defines “midsize” as everyone larger than a size 2. Here’s where it gets confusing. Because yes, couture fashion believes bodies only come in size 0. But the vast majority of straight-sized mall brands stock up to at least a size 10, and it’s not unusual to find 12, 14, and even 16. Ergo, both of these definitions for “midsize” are describing… straight sizes.  

By the way, this conversation gets even more fraught when you spend hours, as I now have, watching self-described midsized TikTok creators define the term. Conley Harris, of @harrishikers (“the outdoors + body positivity”) has spent a lot of time on this and concludes that “if you look it up on Google,” midsize means size 8 to 16.1 She’s annoyed with TikTok (yes, the app on which she creates videos that have received over 3.5 million likes) because “they kind of made their own definition. I don’t even know who ‘they’ is, like this toxic body positive community that isn’t even really body positive,” and it is this amorphous “they” who asserts that midsize should be between straight and plus sizes. Conley disagrees because again, to be clear, she uses “the internet definition.”2

If you now feel like you are drowning, please know that I’m right there with you! Don’t worry, it’s going to get worse! 

TikTok credits the midsizequeen audio to Mary Mondlock, a queer actor/singer and body neutral advocate with over 215,000 followers. Mary has lots of videos celebrating the stretch marks (“if you look hard enough”), stomach rolls, cellulite and jiggly thighs of her midsize body. She talks about not dieting, about wearing the bikini and not giving a fuck. She doesn’t post her body measurements (as we’ll soon see, that’s an unusual move for the Midsize Queen community) and it’s impossible to tell someone’s clothing size from videos shot in selfie mode. But I feel safe saying that Mary has clothing options at the mall. Her body fits into any public space. She is not fat.

And when you start to scroll through the thousands of videos other creators have made using Mary’s audio, you get it: Midsized is not fat, on TikTok. It’s not even “between straight and plus sized.” It’s just thin people who are not a size two. It’s women who are tall and therefore “take up a lot more space”than thin women who are short. It’s women who have a self-proclaimed “big rib cage,” and need to reframe that as an evolutionary adaptation. It is many, many, many blonde white women with barrel curls and hourglass proportions. 

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It’s also worth noting that one article I found credited @midsizecollective over on Instagram with popularizing the term “midsize.” And the models featured there are marginally but definitively rounder than the TikTok Queens. I can see more of these folks falling into that true gray area between a size 14/16 and a size 18/20 or 1X. I am not here to defend Instagram, but it does seem TikTok is where the Midsize Queen goes to slim down.

And yet. The Midsize Queens of TikTok spend a lot of time justifying their midsize status to commenters who say things like “no ur literally skinny.” They aren’t literally skinny, they say, because they wear a dress size with double digits, because they have curves, because their selfies don’t show them in reference to their thinner friends, and if only we could see that sharp contrast, we would understand their plight. This leads to a lot of sharing of weights and heights, as well as bust, waist and hip circumferences. I’m not going to link to too many of those because these kinds of numbers can be very triggering for a whole variety of reasons, and if you’re in a vulnerable place, click the following link with caution. But I do want to link to this video by Olivia Freda, a Midsize Queen with over a million followers. Olivia shares her measurements on the screen while posing with immaculate hair and makeup in various outfits. The audio she uses3 is called Measurement Positivity Chain. It’s credited to another creator named Cassidy, who says, “sometimes I look at girls and I so desperately want to know if that’s what I look like to other people. Because my body dysmorphia can get so bad, I have no idea what I look like. Or what size I am.”

And now, I think, we are getting somewhere. There are over 600 videos from midsize queens using Cassidy’s audio to share their own measurements, and many more variations on this theme. Whatever its original purpose, #midsizequeen has become a kind of anchor for people who don’t trust themselves to correctly interpret their own bodies. That may be because of a diagnosed mental health condition like body dysmorphia or an eating disorder. Or that may be because in their particular orbit, their body does stand out as too tall, too curvy, too much. If your framework is cross country running, or cheerleading, or influencer culture, or insert-any-aesthetic-based-social-group-here, “fat” has a much broader definition and “thin” a much, much narrower one.

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Look, I remember this feeling. I too, was once a Midsize Queen, starting in my late teens and off and on through my 20s and early 30s. This was decades before TikTok, of course, so I didn’t know to define myself as such. But I did struggle with the awareness that my version of thin didn’t quite measure up to the Gold Standard of Thinness that I encountered as a women’s magazine writer (and then, briefly, as a celebrity ghostwriter and that’s a story we’ll save for a world with no NDAs!). There was a particular kind of disorientation about my body back then, which actually did go away once I progressed all the way over into plus sizes, and an ob*se BMI, and could more definitively identify as fat. I use “small fat,” to stand both in solidarity with other fat folks (who created the Fatness Spectrum) and to acknowledge how I continue to benefit from thin privilege. (Here’s where Corinne and I discussed these terms in more detail.)

But what I didn’t reckon with then, and what the Midsize Queens of TikTok are utterly failing to reckon with now, is how you can struggle to appreciate your own body as thin and yet still be absolutely swimming in thin privilege. As Jeff Hunger said in our conversation about who gets to call themselves fat: “If we flatten body image struggles and weight stigma, we lose sight of who truly faces the brunt of interpersonal, instructional anti-fatness—and that’s fat people.” And when you take this conversation into a public space without that awareness, you can cause harm. Because every fat person who finds one of these videos on their For You Page is reminded: Their body is a Midsize Queen’s worst nightmare. 

The harm is especially clear when Midsize Queens talk about intentional weight loss, which many of them do,4 despite Mary’s initial “body neutral” intentions for the song. But it’s also baked into their refusal to acknowledge their many body privileges; that they can access healthcare and fit into public spaces and not expect to be harassed in the grocery store for their food choices. And it’s incredibly clear in how they respond from feedback from actual fat people. Applying midsize to people who can wear straight sizes pushes fat folks even further out of the conversation, explains creator Isabella Dinn. And the casual anti-fat memes used by thin midsize creators reinforces stereotypes like the myth that fat people aren’t sexy or lovable, explains Jordan Underwood. Their followers further elucidate this criticism in the comments on these videos: “Midsize means ‘i wish I was thinner so id like a consolation prize’” and “midsize culture is just white women reassuring themselves they aren’t actually fat.”

But here’s our girl Conley again, furious that “these women” are “discrediting the struggles of thin people.” Note the text on screen: “Not ‘thin,’ just existing in a smaller body.” To Midsize Queens, this distinction will always, always matter. 

Identifying as midsize lets the Queens distance themselves from the plus size community and ignore the struggles of people more marginalized than them, while also co-opting the rhetoric of that community. They are “raising awareness” about midsize bodies; they are “fighting back” against a world that tells them they aren’t good enough. But: The Midsize Queens dance in bikinis and show us their cute outfits because they want the world to know just how close they are to achieving true thinness. They can embrace their stomach rolls or jiggly thighs because they check so many other boxes of marketable beauty. This proximity to the thin ideal creates a dissonance that distracts from how unachievable that ideal is for everyone. It makes it much harder to reject. Midsize Queens aren’t thin enough, and therefore they struggle. But this struggle doesn’t open their eyes to the oppression experienced by people more marginalized than them. It keeps them at the center of the narrative. We scroll and scroll and their bodies are the only ones we get to see. 

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It’s Not NOT a Diet

Also ran titles for this new recurring feature included “Diet Culture WTF,” “Things People Email Me About,” and “I Can’t Unsee This and Now You Can’t Either.” So sorry not sorry for what we’re about to do. But a fact of this job is that I am regularly flooded with press releases, memes, weight loss ads, bad headlines, and all other manner of diet culture ephemera. And many of them are automatic deletes, but some, I need a minute to process. This is going to be a new paid folks only feature, mostly because I don’t want to give free advertising to any of the brands or individuals we’ll talk about here. I also don’t want to have to clarify every time that I do not endorse any of these programs, they are all absolutely, always diets, and particularly egregious examples of the form at that. So if you opt in to read this whole thing, I’m trusting that you know this.

Enough preamble! Here’s our inaugural It’s Not NOT a Diet nominee. The medium is a press release I received via email and the subject of said email is: End the Suffering: F the Food. 

Because ladies, it is time to “trust yourself.” It’s time to “learn how to be resilient in life.” And the best way to do that is by…not eating? 

Let us reckon, for a minute, with this book cover: 

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Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider, and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

Q: My two year old has really gotten into imaginative play lately, and has been asking for stories of various types. Over the last couple of weeks, he has been asking multiple times a day for stories about him and his friends going to a doughnut shop, which involve the selection of doughnuts of different colors which they then bring to family, friends, or teachers. It's pretty cute and I have no idea where it came from, because my partner and I are not that into doughnuts, so he may have had part of a doughnut at Chanukah but that's basically it. He doesn't seem to connect the doughnut shop stories with him going to a real doughnut shop, and I genuinely cannot tell if this obsession is more about the fun colors of the doughnuts and imagining giving gifts to his friends or if he really wants to eat a doughnut.  

So my question is: Should I take him to go get doughnuts?  As I said, I don't really like them (mostly because I feel sick from the sugar and then am starving 20 minutes later) and the nearest place is kind of a pain to get to, so it's not really something I'm thrilled about adding into our routine and then be a thing he wants to do all the time. But if he really is obsessing about doughnuts (rather than some abstract idea of a doughnut shop), then the kid should get to have some doughnuts.

When I was a kid, doughnuts were definitely on the list of "evil fattening foods,” so I'm having trouble trusting my instincts here about what is reasonable and what is diet culture.

I expect every reader of Burnt Toast to unite with me here and say: Take this darling child out for doughnuts! I cannot imagine more adorably wholesome content than your kiddo’s sweet fantasy of picking out doughnuts for everyone he loves. And I cannot wait to hear how excited he is when he goes to a real doughnut shop and sees all of the awesome kinds of doughnuts! (For real. Can you send a photo? We’re invested now.) 

I mean, I guess there is a small risk here that the actual doughnut shop will fail to live up to his vivid imagination. He has clearly concocted some super exciting flavor options. But emphasis on small, because we are talking about doughnuts, which are utterly delicious. One pro tip from someone whose kids are Dunkin’ Donut connoisseurs; go early in the day when they’ll have the best selection. There is nothing sadder than a Dunkin’ around 4pm, when the bakery shelves are almost bare and even the plain glazed is looking stale. 

But now let’s get into the anxieties your question is articulating. You grew up with doughnuts on the “evil fattening foods” list, which it sounds like you are both chafing against now and still feeling somewhat constricted by. It’s hard to let go of those old food rules. But as I’ve reported plenty of times before, restriction breeds fixation. Letting kids have the treat they are excited to eat is the best strategy for ensuring that they don’t develop a scarcity mindset about that food, and can just eat it (or not!) in a joyful, non-fraught way. I also relate to your fear that going to an out-of-the-way doughnut shop once will result in daily requests to trek back there because toddler obsessions get intense, man. (Ask me about the yellow rain boots one of my children wore in every kind of weather for the entirety of her third year.) But it may not play out this way. “Eating doughnuts with your child may decrease his focus on them,” says Anna Lutz, RD, a dietitian who specializes in family feeding dynamics and disordered eating. “You may go once, and that's that. He may want to go several times and then as the newness wears off, he’ll want to go less. You never know what will happen, but you can trust your son and yourself to figure this out.”  

It sounds like you’re also concerned that it might be somehow bad parenting to offer your child a real doughnut to eat if he isn’t specifically asking to eat one. If, as you say, he is maybe just excited about the fun colors doughnuts come in and the idea of sharing them with friends, and doesn’t fully grasp that they are edible. I often hear some version of this from parents of toddlers, especially one- and two-year-olds who aren’t yet in any kind of formal childcare, so caregivers at home still have pretty total control over which foods their kids are offered. I’ve heard parents humblebrag that their toddler thinks a “cookie” means an organic, sugar-free fig bar because they’ve never seen an Oreo, or that they “just don’t have any interest in candy!” And Kid Food Instagram (plus mom groups, plus pediatricians, plus wherever else you’re getting your intel on feeding kids) can convince us that this means we should only ever offer “healthy” foods, and try to keep treats away from little ones for as long as possible. 

“There is a myth that if you introduce chocolate ‘too soon,’ your child is doomed to never like another food,” says Amy Palanjian of YummyToddlerFood, who hears from thousands of toddler parents every week, many of whom share this anxiety. “This is all about parental fear and feeling like we have to narrowly restrict young children in order to set their tastebuds up for ‘success,’ which is to say, try to foster preferences for the foods our culture deems ‘better.’” 

Here’s the thing: Yes, right now, you have total control and your child can only eat the foods you put in front of him. But your time in this bubble is brief. You have maybe a year, tops, before he’s regularly offered food from people who are not you, whether that’s snack at preschool or cupcakes at birthday parties. (And almost anyone with multiple kids can tell you: That this window exists at all is strictly a first kid phenomenon.) While there’s no inherent harm in having a kid wait until age 3 to try their first doughnut, there’s also no need to draw an arbitrary line around treats just because it may not yet have occurred to him to eat them. 

In fact, there is even a benefit to doing it now, with you. Kids should know and trust that joyful eating happens regularly in their lives and with their caregivers. (To be clear: I’m not implying that your regular shared meals are joyless; treats are just one way to engage in joyful eating. But they are an important and highly accessible way!) “This is how we counter the diet culture BS,” says Amy. “By welcoming all kinds of foods into our homes and modeling that we trust ourselves to eat all sorts of foods.” This is what prevents kids from fixating; from needing to sneak food later on; from being the child on the playdate that inhales the sleeve of Oreos because they never get that kind of food at home. And what a gift, to get to share your child’s first doughnut or first-any-treasured-food with them.  

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I know that last part might feel like a sticking point if you truly dislike doughnuts. So I also want to dig a little deeper into your parenthetical comment about how you feel when you eat doughnuts: “Sick from the sugar and then starving 20 minutes later.” I would never deny your lived experience of eating a food, but it can be hard to tell when our response to a formerly banned food is purely physiological and when it’s also diet culture-fueled. So I asked Anna for her dietitian’s take on this, and her response might blow a lot of your minds.

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Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice. Please also be aware that today’s column includes links to research that use o-words and other stigmatizing language to discuss weight, race, and kids. Take care of yourselves.

Q: My child is 5 and started kindergarten this year. He is much taller and stockier than every other kid in his class. Since very early in the year we have gotten reports of disruptive behavior and physical aggression at school. He is not and has never been an aggressive kid at home or on play dates. When I drop him off or volunteer at school I often see other (smaller) kids doing the same things that get my child in trouble, with no reprimands. Also, when I ask him about incidents at school he usually reports that someone kicked or hit him first. We haven’t been able to get a straight answer from the school about whether or not this is what’s actually happening. At this point things have gotten so bad that we have requested a 504 evaluation for our child, with the hope of getting an aide in the classroom to control his behavior. 

My husband and I agree that our kid needs to stop hitting, but we also suspect very strongly that part of the problem is size. Essentially our child is a 5-yr-old in a 7-yr-old’s body, and the school’s position is that he needs to behave like a 7-yr-old, while 5-yr-olds with 5-yr-old bodies get to behave like 5-yr-olds. When we bring this point of view up with the school we are met with adamant insistence that all students are treated the same. They are completely unwilling to consider that they may have different expectations for a larger child. Are we crazy, or is there any research that back up our suspicions?

Whew, yes, there is research. I’m not surprised that school staff are adamant that they treat all students the same. I even fully believe this is their goal, just as I believe doctors who tell me they don’t intentionally discriminate against their fat patients. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t. The whole problem with bias is that it makes it so difficult to objectively assess your own behaviors and impact. As weight stigma researcher Jeff Hunger, PhD, explained on the podcast last week:  

My bias might be at the implicit level and so it could lead me to behave in a way that you pick up as explicit, that you end up feeling discriminated against because of your race, your gender, your weight, when I didn’t really notice that I was doing anything wrong, because my implicit bias was leaking out. So it may not look the same as shouting a derogatory term at someone, but it might be the ways in which I position my body, subtle nonverbal behaviors that I engage in as we interact with one another, things that can shape the outcomes and the experience of the other person, even if I don’t notice them.

Your child’s teachers and school administrators don’t think they have different expectations for a larger child, but the data tells a different story. Children’s weight was more negatively related to their kindergarten teachers’ assessments of academic performance than their test scores in this 2013 study. Physical education teachers may have lower expectations of children in bigger bodies, both in terms of their athleticism and social skills. (A lot of this research focuses on PE teachers specifically because we know they tend to have even higher levels of implicit anti-fat bias than their colleagues.) And kids in larger bodies are often perceived to be “aggressive” but research shows they are far more likely to be the victims of aggression and bullying behaviors than the instigators. Megan, a kindergarten teacher who follows me on Instagram, confirms that she’s seen this bias play out in her own classroom: “I had a few boys in my class last year who were as big and tall as many third graders,” she says. “I spent a LOT of time reminding other staff they were some of the youngest kids in the school since they had spring birthdays.” She also worked with the kids on how to show care for a friend after an accident. “An incident like knocking someone down was often perceived as intentional even though it wasn’t.” (As a fellow parent of a kindergartener, I can affirm—as can anyone who has tried to get a sock on a wiggly five-year-old and gotten kicked in the face—they are all for sure still learning where their bodies are in space!)

This bias around body size intersects with other marginalizations too: Black kids of all genders are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white peers. Latinx kids are also punished more often and here’s some more research on the way Black boys are penalized for their bodies in schools. Black girls are particularly vulnerable to the experience of “adultification” (where teachers and others assume that they are older and should therefore be more mature and better behaved, as you’re noticing with your son). This often leads to sexualizing and penalizing Black girls, especially those in bigger bodies, for behaviors, clothing and so on that white girls can engage in without issue. Black boys And when I threw up a question about this on my Instagram, I heard from many parents of otherwise-privileged tall kids confirming “adultification” happens around height too, especially when girls get to puberty, and a 12-year-old “looks like a woman.” (No. She doesn’t. She looks like a 12-year-old and we need to broaden our definition of what 12-year-olds look like.)  

So educators (like most humans) hold anti-fat bias (along with other biases) and it shows up in their teaching and classroom management. The real question is what should you do when it’s your child caught in the crosshairs of implicit bias. When a teacher calls home, Megan advises asking for specifics. “Where is the behavior happening? Who is around when it is happening?” This might help you establish a pattern that points to a solution. And frame the conversation around the skills your child needs to build. “I would be asking, ‘What social skill do you think my child is missing? What will you do at school to help them acquire that skill? How can I help my child build that skill at home?’” suggests Megan. “I find that focusing on the word ‘skill’ helps to keep conversations about behavior out of the good kid/bad kid false dichotomy.”

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Megan also encourages parents to explicitly state the potential for size bias: “My child is sometimes perceived as older than they are due to their size, and other children and adults may expect them to act in ways that they can’t.” Sharing some of this research (you’ll find lots more here, here, and in this podcast episode) may be helpful, especially if there is one teacher or other person on the school staff who feels like more of an ally (or is at least a clear fan of your child and rooting for him to succeed). I find it helpful to frame these conversations around my own learning: “I’ve been working to understand my own misconceptions around this stuff and here are some changes I’m trying to make.” 

I would do this work alongside pursuing the 504 and the aide—not because your child so clearly requires one, but because it sounds like a way you can work with the school on this issue. Depending on the aide they hire, that person could be an important ally and advocate for your son. You should also continue to investigate how these altercations begin (perhaps the aide can let you know what dynamics they observe between your son and his peers). Five years old is young, but depressingly, not too young for weight-based bullying to have begun. And even if your son’s peers aren’t teasing him directly for his size, he may be picking up on some ambient negativity about his body from other kids or adults, and that could be fueling his response to them. One of the bigger boys in Megan’s class kept getting into physical conflicts with other boys—and because he was bigger, staff tended to blame him. “But after talking to him, I was able to figure out that he felt uncomfortable around other boys and discharged that feeling by initiating conflict,” she says. “He made female friendships much more easily and was able to be more comfortable seated at a table with all girls.”

I’d also explore whether therapy —with a play therapist and ideally one who is fat positive though I realize that might be a unicorn depending where you live—could help your son process what he’s experiencing at school in important ways. And look for ways to give your son positive and affirming experiences in his body. That could be an after school activity like karate, swimming or rock climbing. It could be doing cool jumps on the backyard trampoline or going on family bike rides around the neighborhood. To be clear: I’m suggesting these activities not because I think your kid needs to “exercise,” but because he deserves to feel proud of his physical self. 

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Last thought: Look for allies in other parents of bigger kids. I was inundated with stories from other parents when I asked about this on Instagram, so you truly are not alone. And I loved this anecdote, from Lindsay: “I ran into another tall mom at Disney once, and after I accurately guessed her daughter’s age, she was visibly relieved. It was like we had an instantaneous sisterhood as moms of kids who are expcted to act older than they are. We talked the whole bus ride from the resort to Disney Springs.”

I’m really sorry your son is struggling in this way, and that you have to navigate a biased system not built to support him. But I’m glad he’s got you in his corner. You likely can’t change the school’s entire culture on this (though I do think you may be able to make a few important chips!). But you can validate what he’s experiencing and support him in the body he’s in. I know that doesn’t make it better right now. But it’s actually everything. 

Q: There's something I've been struggling with body image-wise that I haven't seen or heard discussed a lot. I turned 45 years old a few months back. My body is changing like crazy because of perimenopause, pandemic stress and raising a young daughter. (I'm a late-in-life mom and my body didn't "bounce back" after pregnancy.)

I was trying on swimsuits the other day, and I couldn't believe how saggy my skin looked around my belly, hips and breasts in those awful dressing room lights. I also have new dimples on my legs around my knees and calves and forearms. Even the skin around my forearms looks -- I don't know how to describe -- dry, thin, wrinkle-prone.

I can't help thinking: Is this normal? Is this what aging skin looks like on our bodies (not on our faces, because we don't normally cover up our faces)?

I know I shouldn't compare, but my only visible role models are 50+ celebrities like Nicole Kidman and J. Lo. (And the photo editing in media is unreal; I saw a photo spread of Madonna a few months back and she looked the same as she did in the 1980s.) 

It's not something women talk about openly. But I'm guessing I'm not the only middle-aged woman struggling with this. How to be body positive when my body is changing so quickly?

What you’re describing sounds completely normal, at least by the standard of my own 41-year-old set of sags, dimples, wrinkles, and let’s not forget chin hair! But you are right that this is not the “normal” body we ever see celebrated in public discourse around aging. Our culture defines “aging gracefully” most often as “still somehow alive despite reaching her late 40s or 50s and yet not visibly aging at all.”

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WELL, FRIENDS.

It’s still (yes, still!) early for clear results for our close partners in Arizona, but our goal of a tie in the Senate is still on the table. And check out how many of our candidates won!

• RE-ELECTED: Rep. Judy Schwiebert, LD-2

• RE-ELECTED: Sen. Christine Marsh, LD-4

• ELECTED: Representative-elect Laura Terech, LD-4

• ELECTED: Senator-elect Eva Burch, LD-9

• ELECTED: Representative-elect Lorena Austin, LD-9

• RE-ELECTED: Rep. Jennifer Pawlik, LD-13

• ELECTED: Representative-elect Eva Diaz, LD-22

This last one is an especially important victory because Eva Diaz was a last-minute write-in after the winner of the Democratic primary unexpectedly dropped out of the race to take a lobbying job. (Unimpressed emoji face.)

You can catch up on all the other state legislature victories (including MICHIGAN OH MY GOD) on The States Project’s website and Instagram. Even though our dollars didn’t go directly to those states, I still feel that we are very much a part of their celebrations — because some of you formed your own Giving Circles to support those efforts, but even more because we all learned so much about the power of state government and now we know why these small wins are honestly, epic.

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One last bit of housekeeping: Corinne and I are recording your next Ask Us Anything episode on Wednesday. Drop your questions here! (If you’ve missed these previously, you can find all our old AMA episodes here.)

Ask Virginia: Other Kids Are Calling My Kid “Fat.”

Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice. Please also be aware that today’s column includes discussions of overt fatphobia within families and towards children. Take care of yourselves.

Q: My son is 10 years old (in 5th grade) and unfortunately has been dealing with some weight-based teasing among peers. Do you have any resources or recommendations? He got on the elliptical in our basement last night and my heart was just shattering. I want to support him in a body positive, anti-diet way. Thank you so much for all you do! 

First: I’m so sorry. I get letters like yours all the time, which is not surprising since research shows that weight is the number one reason girls are bullied and the second most common reason for boys. Of course your heart is shattering. My heart always shatters a little bit too, to think of yet another great kid being told, in this cruel and manipulative way, that their body is their value. And let’s be clear that fat shaming and bullying isn’t just horrible for kids to experience in the moment; it’s linked with lasting harm. Kids who experienced weight-based teasing at the start of a 15 year study were more likely to struggle with poor body image, disordered eating patterns and more well into adulthood. Parents, teachers, coaches, and school administrators need to believe kids when they tell us about fat shaming, take them seriously, and intervene quickly to stop it and prevent long-term damage.

But my heart also shatters to think of yet another great parent now having to figure out how to support their child in a world that makes this so fucking hard. One thing I didn’t understand about parenting until I was in it, is how the experience of watching your child suffer and doubt themselves is actually exquisitely, physically painful. 

And yet. We know, when it comes to fat shaming and bullying, that this visceral desire to take away the harm can result in parents who cause more harm. Up to half of youth experience weight-based teasing from family members. (Most of the research on this doesn’t differentiate between parents and other relatives, but I’d argue if say, a sibling is the bully and a parent is not intervening, the parent is also effectively the bully.) Not shockingly, this kind of teasing is most likely to happen in families where parents are already concerned about their kid’s weight, dieting themselves, and/or encouraging their kids to diet. Again, all of this has consequences. Kids who are fat shamed by family members report higher levels of stress and substance abuse and lower self-esteem into young adulthood.  And this 2018 analysis of over 2,000 girls found that those who had been labeled “too fat” by age 14 had more disordered eating thoughts and behaviors five years later—and that this relationship “may be most pronounced when the labeling comes from a family member.” The most dangerous call comes from inside the house. 

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Anna, now 38, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, says that her dad teased her for being fat—and chastised her when she got upset about it—because he was determined to toughen her up after kids at school did the same thing. “He always said that bullies tease to get a reaction, so he wanted me to stop reacting and be less sensitive,” Anna says. “[Both my parents] wanted me to be less ‘bully-able,’ and that just made me feel like more of a freak show.”

Here’s the hard thing: The parents who do this are not monsters. They are desperate to protect their children from the world. But there is virtually no line here between protection and blame. “It’s so important to reinforce to your child that they do NOT need to change,” says Rachel Millner, Psy.D, a psychologist based in Newtown, PA who specializes in eating disorders . “They are NOT the ones with the problem or issue. It’s the bullies who need to do the changing.” Anna agrees: “I wish my parents had been more invested in supporting me.” 

It’s not just Anna. I decided to do something a little bit different with my answer for this question. Because I’m a former thin kid who wasn’t bullied for my weight and I believe people with lived experience make the best experts. So I posted your question on Instagram and Twitter so we could hear directly from adults who were bullied for their weight as kids, what parents can do to help in these fraught and fragile moments. And they told me. By the hundreds. But the mistake I made was asking “what did your parents do to help?” Because 99 percent of folks who responded said, “Well here is what they didn’t do.” 

I know, dear reader asking this question, that you don’t want to be part of the problem. That you wouldn’t dream of doing a lot of what I’m going to share. But I think it’s important for all of us to look at this kind of harm because it’s often far more subtle, and more insidious than we might think. And in naming it, we can start to develop strategies for what will help. (There are lots of those on this list too!) But to offer one piece of reassurance right off the bat: “It’s great that this child felt comfortable trusting his mom, and that she wants to support him in a body positive way,” says Rachel (who previously joined me on the Burnt Toast Podcast here). “That, right there, is going to help him with his resilience.” 

What Did Not Help 

• “I don’t even know if my parents realized what was going on and I honestly don’t know what they could have said, but my mom could have demonstrated not fixating on her own weight for sure.”

• “My mom put me on every fad diet—as much popcorn and Diet Coke as I want, but that’s all! Cabbage soup for every meal!—and ignored that my biggest bully was my oldest brother. I’m 42 now and she still denies that happened. I guess I wish she had stopped him. My life would be very different.”

• “I wish they would have said that body shapes change over time and that's normal, instead of saying things like, ‘you don't need more of [x food]’ at the table. My mom was fighting her own ED all the time. She did her best. It just wasn't enough.”

• “I wish they’d modeled feeling confident, strong, and attractive in their bodies regardless of size. Instead I was welcomed and encouraged to start dieting with them.”

•  “I wish they had reinforced that all bodies are good. Not just told to ‘ignore the comments.’”  

• “I wish they hadn't tried so hard to convince me that I wasn't fat (e.g. ‘you're not fat- it's muscle,’ when I was objectively not muscular) and instead told me that being fat isn't a bad thing.” 

• “I wish my mother hadn’t bought into all the diet hype. I wish she didn’t get cosmetic surgery while I was going through puberty. I wish things like grapefruit and cabbage soup were just tasty foods.” 

• “Even though people in power (doctors) were telling me my body was bad, and to lose weight, I wish I had been told that my body was fine and wonderful as it is. I also wish I had been taught about the long term consequences of dieting and starving yourself.” 

• “I wish they had told me that it’s fine to be fat and not a moral failing. I wish they had told me bodies come in all sizes.” 

• “I wish I had believed that my mom loved me just as I was. I wish I believed that now.” 

• “I wish they had taught me the bullies were wrong, rather than encouraging me to go on a diet.” 

• “I wish they told me I was beautiful and exactly the way I was meant to be.” 

• “I wish she never brought me to Weight Watchers.”

• “I wish they had just loved me instead of trying to fix me.” 

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What Does Help

• “They did not further the harm by encouraging me to diet, teasing or shaming me, or treating me differently than my siblings who did not live in larger bodies. I’m very thankful for them supporting me and creating a safe home for me to exist.”

• “They agreed with me that kids and adults alike were assholes. They did not try to get me to change. They accepted that the world sucked.”

• “My mom NEVER commented on my body which made me think maybe weight isn’t so important.”

• “I remember my brother telling me that if anyone ever teased me about something, just say, ‘I know.’ Once, a kid yelled at me, ‘you’re fat!’ And I said, ‘I know,’ and he was very flummoxed. He never teased me again either.” 

• “In fourth grade, after the situation got completely out of hand and was more like a harassment/bullying situation, my parents FINALLY got involved and spoke to my teacher. The teacher spoke to the boy’s parents and it settled down after that. Mind you, it was a very long time (years) of just constant teasing about me being fat.”

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What can we learn from these stories? That fat kids need love and validation, not diet tips. Don’t encourage the elliptical. In fact, don’t make this conversation about his eating or exercise habits at all. It’s just too easy for even seemingly anti-diet advice about intuitive eating and joyful movement to inspire restriction in this context, or at least, to convince him that you, on some level, agree with the bullies that he needs to change.

Your main job right now is to hear him. “You can give him space to share his feelings and thoughts and ask questions,” notes Rachel. That will mean letting him share his negative feelings about his body without rushing in to correct him. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with being fat. But it’s understandable that he feels bad about his body when he’s being made to feel bad about his body! You can make space for those feelings without reinforcing them. A friend recently told me that her daughter said, “I know you want me to embrace my body but I just can’t right now.” And maybe when our kids express this, what they need to hear is not a frantic “of course you should love yourself!” But rather: “I get that feels hard right now. How about I embrace your body for you until you’re ready to do it?” Even when kids tell us they want to change their bodies, they’re really asking, “Am I okay the way I am?” And they need our answer to be HELL YES.

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Rachel also suggests looking for ways to build fat positive community around your family. Reach out to higher-weight friends or relatives (especially if you know any cool teenagers or college students) who are anti-diet and ask if they can talk with him about how they’ve navigated similar situations. 

If you don’t have those resources in real life, look online. Corinne did a little hunting for fat positive influencers who might appeal to a 10-year-old boy; obviously we don’t now your kid and could be way off-base here, but whatever your kid is into, there are incredible fat athletes, dancers, musicians, actors, you name it. (Readers help us out with more in the comments!)

• Erik Cavanaugh, an awe-inspiring fat dancer

• Men of Size, featuring plus size men’s fashion

• Holley Mangold, a fat Olympian weightlifter

• A list of fat musicians to listen to, which somehow doesn’t include CeeLo Green or The Notorious B. I. G.

Depending on the kid, books will also be your friend here. As will Caleb Luna’s list of TV shows and movies with awesome fat protagonists. (And is anyone ever too young to start listening to Maintenance Phase?)

It’s also clear that fat kids need parents to advocate for them and do the work of making spaces safe. Even if this teasing has only been a one-off or sporadic event, it’s worth finding out what your school’s anti-bullying protocol is, and how it’s enforced. Let his teacher know that you’ve noted this instance, and will be alert to others. And if it does become more persistent, have a conversation with your son’s teacher and principal to find out what they do to stop bullying and protect kids who are vulnerable. And: Ask them what they’re doing to educate kids about anti-fat bias. Despite being one of the most common reasons kids are teased, fatphobia is rarely discussed openly or included as an example of hate speech in schools. And the school’s own teachers, curriculum and culture may be inadvertently reinforcing these kinds of comments. 

None of this will be easy. And there will be limits—maybe more like brick walls?— to how much you can change a school’s culture, stop the bullies, and protect your kid. But just by being honest with him, by saying “this is our world, and it’s not okay that you don’t feel safe here,” you will help him start to shift the blame off himself and onto our culture. You’ll give the safe space he needs to feel his way through this, and the tools he needs to navigate it. And that’s how we start to fix it.   

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Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

Q: In Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter piece, The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia. She quoted a tweet that was definitely something I've heard before: “When you think you feel hungry, you're actually thirsty—so just drink water and you'll be fine." In the same vein, I've often heard that it takes 20 minutes for your body to “know” you're full, so people advise eating slowly or waiting to get seconds.

What of this is diet culture BS and what is intuitive eating and/or factoids I can learn from to make the most of an all-you-can-eat situation?

First of all, slow clap for strategizing how to use a rule like “it takes 20 minutes to know you’re full” to your advantage at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I’m trying to decide if that means you have to eat very very quickly to get to everything before this alleged fullness kicks in? Or do you plan to stay for several hours, so you can wait out those fullness windows? Either way, wear stretchy pants and live your best life. 

More to the point: I love this question. There are so many of these rules burrowed into various dark corners of our brains. And divesting from diet culture does mean examining these little pieces of “wisdom” that we’ve taken as fact and deciding which ones are useful and which ones cause harm. Some rules fall very clearly into the “causes harm” bucket. See cutesy terrible mantras like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” (actually, I promise, brownies taste SO MUCH BETTER) and “it’s always good to feel a little hungry” (JUST WHY). 

There are also rules that have changed, evolved and contradicted themselves so much over the last few decades that I hope we can go ahead and throw them out just because it’s so clear that there is no consensus around them. When I polled Instagram followers for their most annoying diet rule, equal numbers of people responded with “breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” and with “never eat breakfast, it just jumpstarts hunger!” As one follower put it: “I still don’t know if breakfast is the most important meal or if you must skip it to lose weight.” 

The main reason we can throw out the vast majority of diet culture rules is that last part: These are strategies for dieting that we learned for the express purpose of losing weight. But study after study has shown that dieting does not result in long-lasting or sustainable weight loss. Dieting also increases your risk for a disordered relationship with food and your body, and chronic dieting (otherwise known as “weight cycling”) is associated with all of the same health issues we normally attribute to being fat. In other words, dieting doesn’t work and even if it did work, it doesn’t improve your health. And dieting reinforces anti-fat bias as a cultural norm, which causes clear and measurable harm in a whole variety of ways to pretty much all of us, but especially fat folks.

The clearest way to decide if a bit of diet culture wisdom is useful to you is to ask: Am I attaching a weight loss goal to this eating strategy? And be honest. Sometimes we think we don’t care about weight loss anymore—like not officially— but we’re still eating according to a diet culture rule because maybe we don’t mind it all that much, and hey if it happened to result in some weight loss and make us effortlessly thin well would that be so bad. And that’s a slippery slope back into full-blown dieting. 

But it’s also true that some of these “rules” could be rooted in a little bit of truth for you. Not because they’ll result in weight loss, and not because they are universally true for everybody but because maybe you do feel better and more functional if you eat breakfast most mornings. “It can be really hard to reconcile that there’s any truth to these when you’re rejecting diet culture,” says Diana K. Rice, RD.  “But it’s ultimately important in understanding how to take good care of ourselves.” And to be clear, that’s taking care of yourself in the sense of enjoying food, feeling nourished by it but not obsessed with it and having energy to get through your day—not “taking care of yourself” as code for getting thin. “What’s actually BS is that diet culture co-opted what we know about human anatomy,” says Diana. “It has us all following black-and-white rules instead of gently using this information to support our own bodies.” 

So another good test of any food rule would be: Are you allowed to break it? “What I’m hearing at the heart of most of this ‘advice’ is ‘Don’t listen to your body, listen to me, the expert,’” says dietitian Anjali Prasertong, MPH, RDN. “That sentiment absolutely has roots in racism, misogyny, cissexism, fatphobia, and other systems of oppression which have a long history in the medical field.” But that premise is so baked into all of our brains that I think sometimes we need to hear from folks in that “expert” position in order to give ourselves permission to think differently. So for this month’s Ask Virginia, I decided to ask Diana, Anjali and a few other favorite anti-diet, fat positive dietitians to help us sort through what you told me were the five most common diet culture rules. Here’s our Dream Team:

• Anjali Prasertong, MPH, RDN, author of the newsletter, Antiracist Dietitian

• Samina Qureshi, RD, of Wholesome Start

• Diana K. Rice, RD, of Tiny Seed Family Nutrition and @anti.diet.kids

• Laura Thomas, PhD, RNutr, author of the newsletter Can I Have Another Snack?

• Whitney Trotter, RDN/LDN, RN, of Bluff City Health

And here’s our mission: To figure out when some of those kernels of maybe-useful information pop up in a diet culture rule —and when it is, in fact, total bullshit. Spoiler: It’s most of it.

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Q: What do you think is an appropriate way to broach fatphobic language with a straight-sized person who has a history of disordered eating? 

I have a sibling who has struggled with anorexia in the past and though they have recovered somewhat, they still use a lot of fatphobic language (mostly in relation to themselves but sometimes others as well, primarily in talking about what kinds of bodies they find attractive). 

I'm never sure quite what to say. Because I don't have their experience I don't know exactly what's going on in their mind around their body and don't want to trigger anything. And, it feels bad to say a version of "don't say that/use those words/etc. about your body!" to a person who struggles with body image when I have never really struggled with it. But I know it's also wrong to just let it go (which is what I probably do about 90 percent of the time). 

The few times I've attempted to say something have been received with some version of "who do you think you are to talk about fatphobia to someone who had anorexia?" I would appreciate any insight you may have.

I haven’t had this conversation in real life with a family member. But I have had a version of it online, in comment sections, every time I’ve written about thin privilege—and so has every other fat activist and anti-diet writer. Consider the comments (but also CW/spare yourself the drama) on this post from fat positive eating disorder therapist Shira Rosenbluth, LCSW: 

Shira’s post is important, and reminiscent of one of my favorite Julia Turshen pieces, where she writes: “It hit me one day like a splash of cold water in the face. I had only ever felt two things in my life: happy or fat.” We are all socialized to say “I feel fat” instead of naming our actual emotions. And for folks with anorexia,1 the process of replacing that language (and the related anti-fat behavior of restriction) with a more honest and accurate discussion of feelings can be terrifying and brutal. “People living with anorexia nervosa are often at war with their conditions,” explains Jaclyn Siegel, PhD, a social psychologist who studies the lived experiences of people in eating disorder recovery, as well as the psychology of prejudice at San Diego State University. “Their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and capacity to process the harm of their actions may be dramatically affected by a) the condition itself or b) malnutrition.” 

But, Shira and Jaclyn—who both have lived experiences with their own anorexia, in addition to their professional expertise—agree: Having an eating disorder isn’t “a moral pass to perpetuate weight stigma and fatphobia,” as Jaclyn puts it. “Having an eating disorder doesn’t mean you are incapable of being considerate,” says Shira. “And treating people with eating disorders as if they are incapable of insight and improvement is infantilizing and not actually helpful for them.” 

The tricky thing to hold together here is that your sibling can be both harmed by fatphobia, in the ways it has taught them to weaponize their weight and food, and cause that harm to others. They are perpetuating fatphobia in the ways they talk about bodies. (We’re doing this even if we only talk about ourselves, by the way; your fat friends are listening.) That doesn’t mean they aren’t also struggling. But—and I truly do not mean this metaphor to make light of mental health struggles—we teach little kids to sneeze into their elbows (and hey, wear masks!) for a reason. We can be sick and still not want to spread that sickness to others. In this way, I don’t think it’s hypocritical for someone with an eating disorder to be a fat justice advocate, therapist, or otherwise active in fat liberation; you can be deep in your own personal struggle and still know your values. And you can also know your behaviors aren’t matching up to those values and still struggle to change them, because this shit is hard. Sometimes, understanding the larger impact of our behaviors can be a helpful tool towards recovery.

It'’s also worth noting that we can be struggling desperately with our own bodies and yet also benefit from thin privilege in terms of how we can access and navigate the world, as Aubrey Gordon explained on the podcast last year. And a thin person making fatphobic comments has even greater potential to do harm because of this privilege. Again, this doesn’t mean that a thin person with an eating disorder doesn’t deserve our support and compassion. But they can deserve our support and compassion and cause harm to fat folks—who also deserve our support and compassion.  

So. How do you begin to navigate this conversation? You are right that chastising or correcting isn’t the way to go. “Calling out their comments to shame them into behavior change is not supportive to your sibling’s recovery,” says Jaclyn. But you can validate their feelings and offer a reframing. If your sibling says, “I feel so fat today,” Jaclyn suggests responding with: “I’m sorry it sounds like you’re having a tough time right now. But can I ask you something? What’s wrong with being fat?” This might gently segue you into a deeper conversation about anti-fat bias. If you are fat, Shira suggests explaining in a kind but direct way how their comments impact you: “When you call yourself a fat slob, I wonder how disgusting you think my body is.” (If you’re not fat, or don’t feel comfortable talking about yourself, you could also reference a fat loved one here.) Make sure they know you’re not ascribing harmful intent: “I know this is not your intention. You’d never want to hurt me!” And then offer an alternative: “It would feel different for you to say, ‘I’m struggling with my body image right now’ instead of ‘I’m a disgusting fat pig.’” 

Your sibling’s comments about what kinds of bodies they find attractive are also worth (again, kindly) challenging—and may even feel like an easier place to start than their self-deprecation. “Attraction is a complicated topic because no one owes anyone sex or romance or their attraction,” says Jaclyn. “But interrogating the roots of ‘personal preference’ in the context of attraction can be a helpful exercise.” As I’ve written before, nobody just doesn’t want to be fat. And nobody just happens to think that thin people are hotter than fat people. These are not quirky idiosyncrasies; they are biases we’ve learned from our fatphobic society. So here you might be able to dig deeper. Jaclyn suggests questions like: “Why do we favor one body type over another? Where are we getting our information about what or who is sexually attractive?”  

If any kind of direct conversation feels too fraught, you can talk more generally about your own un-learning process and offer to share books, articles, or podcast episodes you’ve found helpful. The hardest part for me in these conversations is that they don’t always work. At least, not right away. Some part of my brain is always hoping for the instant conversion—and the odds of that happening are basically none. So don’t be shocked if your sibling shuts you down initially. “If they don’t respond in the way you’d like, don’t push or get angry,” advises Jaclyn. “You’re their sibling, not their therapist. Perhaps they will take this conversation into therapy with them next week.” Keep in mind how long it took for you to question these basic assumptions like “fat equals bad,” and understand that the eating disorder will understandably lengthen and complicate this process for your sibling. 

And don’t give up hope. “I remember gently telling a 14-year-old who was calling herself fat and disgusting in group, that maybe she could reconsider the words she used,” Shira says. The girl’s first response was defensiveness and anger. But she was ultimately able to reflect, and express her feelings with other words. “People can be thoughtful about the language they use!” says Shira. “And it helps them too.” 

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Q: Recently at a moms’ wine night, two thin moms, one fat mom, and me, a plump mom, sat around talking about how we respond to our kids pointing their fingers and asking, in that volume only a toddler can reach, “MAMA WHY IS THAT MAN FAT?” 

We all agreed that we prefer to focus on the manners of pointing/bringing questions about others’ bodies to mom and dad in private. I admitted that I find it easier to respond to kids who call me fat, because then I can joyfully say, “Yes, and I love my body.” I explicitly said I don’t want my kids to think some bodies are better than others, and everyone agreed. And then, I’m thinking of how I have practiced responding to “She has brown skin!” or “He’s missing a hand!” with a warm acknowledgment of “Yes and aren’t all bodies wonderfully different!” not a hushed taboo we-don’t-talk-about-that. It’s easy to do with race, not so much with body size, because our culture doesn’t want to believe darker skin is bad but somehow our culture does seem to want to believe larger bodies are bad. Racism and anti-fat bias are both issues, but anti-fat bias is still met with such justification. 

But…not one of us looked directly at the largest mom in the room or asked her directly what she thought. It felt taboo to even acknowledge the obvious, which is that she is fatter than we are, so she has more lived experience than we do on this matter, and probably the most useful opinions. I don’t know her or how she relates to her body or whether she identifies with the word fat, and it was just so…darkly fascinating that even as we’re discussing how we want our kids to relate to all bodies as good, anti-fat culture was preventing us from doing the same amongst ourselves. If we’d been having the same discussion about a neutral or broadly-admired trait, it would have gone differently. I’d love your thoughts.  

Oh God. I read this and a little bit died for you all. Because oh, I have been here—with fatness, but also with race, or sexuality or probably any other marginalization—and I bet, if they’re honest, most newsletter readers have too. There is such a particular vibe that comes from well-intentioned people trying to talk thoughtfully about an uncomfortable issue and yet remaining so uncomfortable that they end up perpetuating the very harm they are trying to avoid. And yes, your fat friend noticed. She noticed the lack of eye contact and the lack of direct questions. I can’t say how she felt about it—she may have been glad the conversation didn’t center on her, for a variety of reasons. She also may have been quietly, justifiably fuming at how your discussion ignored her lived experience and existence. And whether she was glad for your silence or furious about it, or somewhere in the middle, she almost certainly did not feel seen. 

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Q: Hey Virginia!

I have a question for your Ask Virginia column. It’s fairly simple, straightforward, and I’m very scared of the answer I’m gonna get, but whatever you say, I’ll do:

Should I get rid of my scale?

Should I not even own a scale?

Thanks!

—A girl who’s afraid of regretting getting rid of her scale the minute she does.

Yes, you should get rid of your scale. 

Yes, you should not even own a scale. 

Yes, we should light all the scales on fire and dance naked and free around them while they burn. (Scientific American actually did this for me once, for this story. Okay, not the naked dancing part.)

But you knew all of that. 

You also probably know that having a scale at home is an invitation to track and obsess and think about your weight as a metric you should somehow be able to control. If you have kids in your house, it’s also an invitation for them to track and obsess and think about their weight as a metric they should somehow be able to control. We live in a culture that believes body size determines our beauty, health and moral value—so weighing yourself daily is like forcing yourself to take a brutal pop quiz every morning and you can only pass or fail and probably, only fail. You don’t need to fail a test every day because you are an awesome person whose value cannot be measured in pounds. So you don’t need to own a scale. 

Now, I’ve talked before about whether you should get weighed at the doctor’s office, and noted that there are a few conditions (eating disorder recovery, heart failure, etc) where a medical professional knowing your weight can be important. But that doesn’t mean you need to know your weight. And it definitely doesn’t mean that you need to know it every day or once a week or after you’ve eaten a big meal, or gone for a long run, or whatever other ritualistic schedule you may have used for weighing yourself in the past. In fact, with most of those medical conditions, monitoring weight at home would be unnecessary or even contraindicated—someone weight restoring from an eating disorder certainly shouldn’t be doing this. 

The only time I can recall feeling like a home scale was medically necessary in my life is when we bought an infant scale in 2013. Our older daughter was a feeding tube-dependent baby in between open heart surgeries and we were required to record her weight and blood oxygen levels daily because any sudden drop on either number could have been a medical emergency. I am pretty sure you are not a medically fragile infant because you wrote such a good email! So you don’t need to own a scale. 

I hear you on the fear that you’ll regret getting rid of the scale. I started weighing myself in middle school; my dad weighed himself every day of my childhood and I thought it was just something we did to be healthy (because yes, we equated healthy with thin). It’s scary to reprogram ourselves to think of the scale as optional, useless, or even detrimental. If you’re an overachiever type, it can feel like you’re not checking all the boxes you’re supposed to check. If you’re fat, weighing yourself may feel like one of the ways you perform being a Good Fatty. But all of that is stuff we do for other people. There might be times in a scale-free existence where it feels hard not to be pleasing others. But I wonder what you would really regret, for yourself, if you get rid of the scale? 

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I can tell you that it helped my health not at all to weigh myself daily, which I did for most of my twenties. It didn’t help to weigh myself before and after long runs. It didn’t make me happier the day I felt like running an entire half marathon “didn’t count” because I somehow weighed more after it than I had first thing in the morning. And it certainly didn’t improve my health to then go for a long run the very next day and fracture my foot. All because I was measuring my health and my success as a person pretty much solely by the number on the scale. It may be hard to get rid of your scale and you deserve support while you work through what it means to reject the expectations that come with tracking your weight. But I don’t think you’ll regret giving yourself a break from the pressure to perform your body. So you don’t need to own a scale. 

In that doctor’s office piece, I also noted that there is some inherent fatphobia in being afraid of the scale. I wrote: 

If you know, on some level, that you’re refusing to see the number because it will make you feel bad, it’s worth noting that you have some work to do disentangling body size and value. 

Both your attachment to your scale and the negative feelings that the scale can evoke are rooted in anti-fat bias and that’s worth naming and investigating. But even if neutralizing your feelings about your weight is the goal, frequent home weigh-ins are not how we get there. Because in a perfect world, we wouldn’t attach moral value to our weight, and a number on the scale wouldn’t change our emotional state in any way. But in this world, we also wouldn’t pursue intentional weight loss because thinness wouldn’t be celebrated and fatness wouldn’t be demonized. And we wouldn’t equate weight with health and doctors would provide weight-inclusive care instead of prescribing weight loss. So even if you live in a magical fatphobia-free utopia, there is no reason for you to own a scale.

Because if any of us are ever going to get to live in that world, we need to light the scales on fire. 

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Diet Culture At the Family Table: Very pleased to announce that I’ve got a new webinar on weight stigma and feeding disorders live now over at Responsive Feeding Pro. It’s geared towards feeding therapists and dietitians but has lots of good info for parents, teachers, and other caregivers too—if this piece resonated with you, you may find it useful. (And it’s just $32, plus they have a $10 rate for students and marginalized folks!)

Read This: Margaret Wheeler Johnson for Bustle on the high rates of eating disorders among nutritionists.

Last Chance! Corinne and I are recording our next AMA episode on Thursday, so if you’ve got questions to submit, here’s where they go.1

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Q: I thought of you last night as I had a very heartfelt discussion with a friend. We were talking about body positivity and all the things I am doing to keep my straight-sized daughter healthy and avoid an eating disorder. She shared that she has an opposite problem with her son. He has gotten quite big and it's affecting his mental health and his ability to do things he likes. For example: He no longer wants to go to the pool. And at camp he wanted to kayak, but you aren't allowed to do white water kayaking until you can flip and recover the kayak, and he couldn't practice that because he needed to be in a canoe due to his size. He has expressed interest in losing weight, and they want to support that and support his ability to do all the things he wants to do, BUT they want to do it in an emotionally healthy way. 

Do you have thoughts on how she might support him in a way that feels good to him and doesn't stigmatize or damage his mental health? But, also, how can she help him reach his goals (whatever they are)?

You are worrying about how to keep your thin daughter from becoming too thin. 

Your friend is wondering how to help her fat son lose weight.

These situations are not “opposite problems.” They are one and the same problem.

You are both parents who love kids who are struggling to feel good about their bodies in a world that tells them to take up less space. You both want them to feel better about their bodies. You both want to protect their mental health. The problem here is that you are both letting anti-fat bias define what this “better” would look like. This is why you can see quite clearly that the goal for your daughter is to avoid dieting at all costs—but are pondering whether that same risky behavior is the solution for her son.

Framing these situations as “opposite problems” privileges the struggle of the thin child as somehow more genuine and deserving of help. She needs to be protected from the evils of dieting and eating disorders because after all she isn’t even fat. (I know you didn’t use that phrase, but if I had a dime for every email from a parent of a thin kid that does include it, I would not need paid newsletter subscribers.) But when actual fat kids are told they shouldn’t be fat, a part of us thinks, well, yes. All of their problems, we assume, could be fixed by just losing some weight. 

This is dangerous because it’s wrong: Diets don’t make us happier. Teenage girls who dieted “at a severe level” were 18 times more likely to develop eating disorders than those who did not, according to a three-year study on almost 2,000 kids published by Australian researchers. Even moderate dieters were five times more likely to progress to an eating disorder; future studies have replicated these findings repeatedly. More recent research has taught us that kids in bigger bodies may be even more likely to engage in disordered eating than their thinner peers, no doubt because we are so often convinced they “need” to eat this way to lose weight. Even when they don’t contribute to eating disorders, dieting messes with our minds and bodies: I wrote more about the harm caused when we put kids on diets here and here. 

And it’s dangerous to assume weight loss will solve a fat kid’s problems because it’s deeply fatphobic: Why does a thin child get mental health support and tools for insulating themselves against the pressures to be thinner while a fat child is offered none of the above? Why is he instead steered directly towards the same toxic messaging you know to be harmful for your daughter? Why is the fat kid’s body and mind somehow less worth protecting? 

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Now let’s consider the ways we might perceive this child’s weight as impacting his health and happiness—because in both examples you gave me, the problem is not his body, but the way our culture treats fat bodies.

Example A: He doesn’t feel comfortable going to the pool. This isn’t a physical limitation. Fat people can be great swimmers. The real question is why your community pool doesn’t feel like a safe space for fat kids. Maybe it’s attached to a gym that pushes a ton of weight loss marketing.1 Maybe he’s been bullied at the pool (and this could mean teasing from other kids, but also unsolicited comments about his body from adults). Maybe he’s outgrown last year’s swimsuit and feels self-conscious asking for a new one. Maybe he knows his parents want him to swim more, consciously or not, because they want him to lose weight and that’s taking all the joy out of the experience. 

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Example B: He couldn’t learn to flip and recover a kayak because the camp put him in a canoe instead. I also do not know how to flip and recover a kayak because I never went to a camp that taught kayaking (former theater kids represent!), so I turned to YouTube to help me understand this concern and lo and behold this fat guy with a lawn mower has a super helpful video explaining exactly how to flip and recover a kayak in a bigger body.2 I also found this extremely thorough and fat-positive video that explains why kayaking is absolutely possible for fat folks and walks through the different types of kayaks that work best and are designed to be size-inclusive. And my favorite fat kayak resource is the delightful Parker explaining how to get in and out of a kayak without falling over, which honestly always seems like the hardest part?

(Post-publication note: An astute fat kayaking reader named Madeline noted below that all of these resources are geared towards recreational kayaking, which is different from white water kayaking. But Madeline assures us that fat folks can do white water kayaking too! So my larger point stands even if my grasp on the nuances of the sport is a bit shaky.)

This is not meant to be an exhaustive dive into the world of fat kayaking, though I am so pleased to now know that it exists. The real question we need to ask here is: Why doesn’t his camp have kayaks that fit bigger bodies? Why doesn’t his camp have staff trained to help fat kids learn the same skills they’re teaching thin kids? Why does this kid have to feel like a failure in a canoe when it took a 30-second Google search to see that he absolutely can learn to kayak, no weight loss required?

The answer, of course, is anti-fat bias. 

I know it might feel daunting for your friend to tackle this bias at the community pool, or to demand the camp (that she is presumably paying for!) stock better kayaks. We are so used to viewing fatness as a failing, as something we don’t talk about, and as a matter of personal responsibility that it requires a significant mindset shift to start saying, “Hey, my kid doesn’t feel safe or supported here, and that’s what needs to change.” 

I know it’s further complicated by the fact that this kid has stated his own weight loss goal. As parents, we’re used to thinking that supporting our kids means supporting their goals and dreams, and as people in diet culture, we’re used to thinking that a fat person losing weight is a reasonable way to improve body image and health, which sound like nice goals to achieve. But there is no “emotionally healthy” way to support a child’s weight loss goal because intentional weight loss isn’t healthy or safe for kids—no matter what their starting weight. It doesn’t undermine his body autonomy to push back against this desire to lose weight, just like it doesn’t undermine our kids’ body autonomy to make them wear seatbelts or get vaccines. And just like it doesn’t undermine your thin daughter’s body autonomy if you were to stop her from dieting. 

It is important to validate the feelings and experiences that are causing this kid to say “I need to lose weight.” But we can do that without endorsing the idea that he should lose weight, by naming the anti-fat bias he’s experienced and by talking about how hard it is to have a body, especially a fat body, in a culture that tells us we’re doing that wrong. This reframes the problem, which is the first step towards helping him let go of his internalized fatphobia. Because I suspect he’ll keep saying “I need to lose weight” until somebody says to him: “Actually, your body is not the problem here.” 

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You voted and the results are in: We’ll be reading ESSENTIAL LABOR by Angela Garbes for the August Burnt Toast Book Club! Mark your calendars for Wednesday, August 31 at 12pm Eastern.

Burnt Toast Giving Circle Update! We’ve raised almost $25,000 which is so utterly amazing. You can, of course, still join the effort here. And if you’d like to learn more about why we chose Arizona, the candidates, and our path to victory, The States Project is hosting a virtual conversation TONIGHT, featuring our endorsee, Lorena Austin, Democratic candidate for LD-9. RSVP here to attend.

Q: How do you avoid diet culture nonsense when on a medically-necessary diet? 

Background: I’m 41, and just had my first colonoscopy during which some polyps “of concern” were found and removed. Family history of colon cancer, of course. My gastro commanded a high-fiber diet and said I’ll also want to avoid red meat, cured meats, and alcohol.  

Looking for resources on what to eat and how to prepare it has led to a lot of chia-pudding-industrial-complex nonsense in front of my eyeballs. Or gross/restrictive/bullshit, however you want to frame that. 

I’m a small fat who is into weightlifting, and generally feel like I look like a sexy tank. I’m at a stage where I understand that weight loss qua weight loss isn’t actually going to help this particular condition, and I know that my weight loss attempts in the past probably led to some of the GI issues I’m facing now.

I presume this is something to take to a dietitian, but I’m not super comfortable with that, due to what I assume will be the obligatory weight loss discussions. Is there weight-neutral food and health advice out there that I’m missing? 

I promise, we are going to talk specifically about the health risks of red meat. But I picked this question because I get asked some version of “what if I have to stop eating X for Y health reasons?” often, and so what I really want to do today is offer a framework to help all of us think about whether any particular medical dietary change is necessary and whether that change will be health and wellness-promoting for you.

Sometimes this question is clear cut: When I was 11, I ate a bunch of (delicious) shrimp. I immediately broke out in hives all over my face and inside my mouth, so I took a bunch of Benadryl and have spent the subsequent 30 years never eating shrimp again. My reaction was mild, but allergic reactions can go deadly fast and nobody needs shrimp cocktail in their life that badly. Also: While it’s sometimes a minor inconvenience to skip shrimp, I don’t feel restricted or stressed out by that decision, in part because I can still happily eat every other kind of seafood.

Sometimes food restrictions are necessary even when they cause significant stress. When my older daughter was recovering from life-threatening complications after open heart surgery, we had to put her on a virtually fat free diet for several months and it was an utterly miserable thing to do to a toddler. But we couldn’t have gotten her out of the pediatric ICU without it. Living with Celiac Disease or a peanut allergy likely falls into this category. It utterly sucks and requires a ton of support to navigate, but you can’t live a safe or functional life without this restriction.

More often, though, doctors and other healthcare providers tell us to cut out certain food groups as a preventative or experimental strategy. The reasons for making this change aren’t cut and dried. The strength of their evidence varies wildly. And these prescriptions are very often steeped in diet culture. This means nobody is spending much time helping you consider the toll that this kind of eating pattern may take on your mental health or larger physical well-being. They aren’t watching to see if it triggers a restrictive mindset or adds to your daily stress in other harmful ways. And: Nobody is articulating the underlying anti-fat bias that informs many of these medical recommendations. I’ve asked Marci Evans, MS, CEDRD-S, LDN, an anti-diet dietitian who specializes in the intersection of gut health and eating disorders, in Cambridge, MA to help us think through this much murkier category of Medical Diet Advice. Which, by the way, should always be framed as “advice” and not a requirement. “I strongly believe that decisions around food elimination are for my client to make, not for me,” says Marci. “Body autonomy is incredibly important. And I rarely advocate for removing entire food groups because it’s rarely necessary.”

So on that note, let’s talk beef.

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As I’m celebrating/assessing this first year of Burnt Toast, I’d love to get to know you all better. In what is perhaps a refreshing twist in this age of privacy invasion, Substack tells me nothing about you beyond your email address and which newsletters you open or interact with. I promise, we have zero interest in selling or hoarding your data—but it would help us tremendously to learn more about what you think of Burnt Toast. If you have five minutes, please take this reader survey.

You can remain anonymous and be as brutally honest as you’d like! And everyone who participates will be entered in this month’s Burnt Toast Book Giveaway! (If you’ve already subscribed or renewed and entered, we’ll enter you a second time for doing the survey!) Thanks so much for helping us continue to make Burnt Toast a place you like to be.

And don’t forget to submit your question for Virginia’s Office Hours!

I love writing out these responses, but so often think “I’ve got follow-up questions!” or “I’d love to hear what they think and hash this out further.” These new bonus podcast episodes will be our chance for paid subscribers to do just that! (And yes, you can stay anonymous.) 

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Q: Do you think it’s problematic for people with thin privilege to call themselves fat? 

A: Yes, yep, a thousand times yes—if only because I’ve never heard a thin person describe themselves as fat in a truly positive way. I’ve heard thin people say “I feel so fat.” I’ve heard thin people explain that they are “fat” by the standards of a certain community (ballerinas, models, Hollywood, gay guys who brunch in Chelsea). I’ve heard thin people make fat jokes. I’ve even heard thin people describe themselves as fat in a semi-rebellious way, like when a very thin supermodel says in an interview that she loves her “big booty,” only the booty is objectively not big and so her claiming that it is only reinforces that you have to be very brave and very thin to do this. In every one of these instances, a thin person is using fat as an insult, a weapon, a worst case scenario. 

I do sometimes hear thin people use “fat” to mean “cute.” This happens when encountering the chubby thighs of a baby, or a funny cat meme. In this scenario, fat isn’t an insult, exactly. But I’ve never heard a thin person say they wished they had the thigh rolls of a cherubic one-year-old. Even when fat is adorable, it’s not aspirational to most thin people. 

And yet. Most fat people have experienced a thin person describing themselves as fat, or bemoaning their weight gain to us with some expectation of validation and solidarity. There seems to be a sense that if they are struggling to love their body that we must be having a shared experience. But we aren’t. When I walk into a store with a thin friend, we might both struggle to like how we look in jeans but she can struggle while trying on jeans in her size, in that store, while my struggle will be more existential because jeans in my size are nowhere to be found. Similarly, if I were to tell someone fatter than me how empowering it was to say no to the scale at a doctor’s appointment, I would not be building solidarity with them because mid-fat and superfat people don’t approach that question the same way. (It doesn’t matter if they get on the scale or not; they will still experience medical fatphobia.) When smaller people tell larger people how hard it is to be large, we aren’t being good allies. We’re telling them that their bodies are our nightmare—and rendering their own struggle (or their own acceptance! Not every fat person hates their body!) invisible at the same time. 

What’s a better way for thin people to talk about their bodies? For starters, by doing it way, way, way less. Whether your thinness is the result of genetic privilege or restrictive lifestyle behaviors or both, it’s truly the least interesting thing about you. If you’re struggling with your body and want to talk about that struggle to someone with less thin privilege than you, maybe don’t. Or at least, consider this advice from Aubrey Gordon (from our Burnt Toast Podcast conversation):

I think asking for consent about that stuff is important. Like, “I’m having a bad body image day, are you up for talking about it?” [...] And check yourself in the process, not just for the person that you’re talking to, but also for your own perception. Like “I’m having a really hard time finding clothes that fit,” and “I know people who wear larger sizes than I do, and I can’t imagine what it’s like for them. This is so frustrating, right?” This way, you’re acknowledging the experience of either the person that you’re talking to or fat people more broadly. 

And if you want to call yourself fat as a compliment, consider whether fat people around you will take it that way. A useful exercise here is to consider how it feels when white people try to “act Black,” by using certain speech patterns, wearing dreadlocks, or otherwise appropriating Black culture. It’s not a great look! And it’s similarly problematic to turn fatness into a novelty, or a persona you, as a thin person, can dabble in without risking any of the oppression that comes with living as a fat person in our culture. A better first step for thin allyship is to just stop making it about you. Says Aubrey: “Ask [your fat friends] how they want to talk about fatness. And then do those things.” 

Q: My parents will be watching my 11-year-old fraternal twin boys for a week this summer. One of my twins, Joe, has always been extremely skinny while the other, Max, has a more average/small frame. Both boys love food and love eating.

Recently, Max gained a little weight. He's active and healthy and still growing and we have talked about it twice—both times initiated by him. His father and I have not said anything else.

I'm afraid my parents will say "innocuous" things to Max about his weight and eating habits. For example, they wouldn’t say anything if Joe has seconds but may suggest that Max should think before he eats a second helping. Or, because Joe doesn't like desserts, they will discourage Max from eating any. They think they're subtle, but they're not. Yes Dad, I do remember the time when I was 16 and you asked me if I really needed that chocolate bar. I did. It was delicious.

Can you suggest any language I can use to ask my parents not to compare my kids to each other? Or to hold their tongues if Max asks for dessert every night? He has anxiety issues and is finally not hating his body and I'm worried this could set him back.

A: Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote an essay about why the grandparents are not OK. It is still one of the most widely read pieces on Burnt Toast and we continue to get some version of this question every month. So with summer vacation and family visits on the horizon, let’s get into it again, and go over some strategies we may all find helpful when we find ourselves mired in this kind of intergenerational diet culture.

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REMINDER: We're recording a special AMA episode of the podcast today! (You’ll hear it in a few weeks.) So you’ve got a few more hours to submit your questions via this Google Form. Everything is fair game!

Q: I would love to hear some solid research behind intermittent fasting. You see it proposed as a cure for literally every condition: Diabetes, cancer, aging, etc. And I know tons of people who subscribe to it. 

I also know tons of people who subscribe to intermittent fasting. And, every time I ask folks which diets we should debunk on the podcast’s bonus episodes, a bunch of you ask me to talk about it. It kind of blows my mind that we need to talk about it, because, I don’t know…this one doesn’t seem that hard? Yes, any “lifestyle plan” that requires you not to eat for significant portions of your waking day is a diet. See also any plan that requires you to periodically fast for several days. Not eating is a kind of dieting and a pretty intense one at that.  

But intermittent fasting proponents have long worked to separate what they do from “dieting” by applying a thick veneer of It’s Just Science. We gloss right over the part where they tell you not to eat, because the advice is coming from doctors and researchers, using lots of jargon and gadgets. See Peter Attia, MD,1 who measures his blood glucose, lactate and ketone levels fastidiously on three or four different devices during his monthly three-day fasts, and shares pictures of the results with his 301,000 Instagram followers. Intermittent fasting is the diet—nay, the life optimization regimen!—of tech bros, of innovators and disruptors, of Real Men. 

Well. It’s looking like all those dudes got the data wrong. Intermittent fasting has no benefit, according to a randomized one-year trial published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers put 139 people (all of whom had BMIs in the ob*se range) to eat low-calorie diets and randomly assigned half of them to also only eat between 8am and 4pm. They also had to photograph everything they ate and keep food diaries. By the end of 12 months, the researchers concluded that the group only eating during business hours had done no better on their diet than the group eating the low calorie diet at any time of day. The intermittent fasters didn’t lose more weight and they also didn’t improve various markers of health any more than the control group—which suggests this diet is probably not a miracle cure for your future diabetes or cancer.

This is not the first study to show that intermittent fasting doesn’t work, though it is the longest run trial to date. And the diet’s disciples are not okay. “I was a devotee,” Dr. Ethan Weiss, a diet researcher at the University of California, San Francisco told Gina Kolata for the New York Times. “This was a hard thing to accept.” For seven years, Dr. Weiss had only eaten between noon and 7pm but his own research has shown similarly dismal outcomes for intermittent fasting. He is now eating breakfast again. 

Here’s the frustrating part: This new data is not inspiring Weiss or any other diet researcher to question the fundamental premise of their work. That’s because everyone in the trial did lose some weight in the year they were studied (they just didn’t lose any more weight than the folks following the regular low-calorie approach). This is not surprising. Restricting caloric intake will induce weight loss in most people for as long as you continue to restrict caloric intake. The study didn’t follow people long enough to see what happens when restriction inevitably stops.

We know that most people regain the weight they lose on a diet within two to five years. We also know that this yo-yo pattern of gaining and losing weight increases your risk for a disordered relationship with food. (Indeed, some of us would argue that restricting your calories or having times of day when you aren’t allowed to eat is disordered right on the face of it.) Yo-yo dieting, also known as weight cycling, is associated with many of the health risks we normally attribute to higher body weights. The fact that people lost a small amount of weight after a year of dieting is in no way an endorsement of either diet as a long-term strategy for health. 

And there is no reason to think that intermittent fasting will work better for people in the long-term than any other diet. For starters, it’s already not working better in the short-term, as this new research shows. But it’s also a patently unsustainable concept. Which is why it almost doesn’t matter if intermittent fasting can reduce your future risk of disease—even if it did, you’re really unlikely to do it long enough to accrue that kind of benefit. That’s because fasting is restriction, which is the basis of almost every eating disorder. If your timed eating plan lets you eat whatever you want during approved eating hours, you’re living in a restrict/binge cycle. If your plan makes you continue to show restraint by eating only very specific foods or a low number of calories during your feeding periods, you’re living with several different kinds of restriction.  

Whatever version of fasting we’re talking about: Humans are not designed to do well with restriction. We’re designed to survive famines, which means our bodies have all kinds of physiological processes on board to fight starvation. Our metabolism slows down (in order to stave off weight loss so your body can tap into the energy stored in your fat). Production of our hunger hormones ramps up, to remind us to find food and stop starving. The reason diets fail for most people is because our bodies want to save us from ourselves. 

But getting weight loss scientists to acknowledge this is like asking the sun not to shine. “We just need to do larger studies,” another researcher told Kolata, apparently unconvinced by this new round of data, let alone the past 50 years of diet research. Dr. Caroline Apovian, co-director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said she “would still recommend intermittent fasting to patients, even though ‘we don’t have proof.’” That’s how I like my medical advice—footloose and evidence-free!  

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to have this new study demonstrating so clearly that intermittent fasting is not the diet industry’s silver bullet. Only data defeats pseudoscience. But the real progress will come when we stop spending money on research comparing one shitty diet to another shitty diet, and instead start studying how to support people’s health.    

Q: My daughter is almost 12, regular size, and she talks the talk on body-shaming, but she struggles with the concept when it comes to her own body. Some context: She was extremely skinny and small as a toddler, then not so much ages 9-11, hit puberty. In short, her body's been all sorts of shapes and sizes in a dizzyingly short period of time. I gave up dieting 3.5 years ago and our household is generally “eat what you want when you want to eat it.” I am regular size, as is her dad. I'm pretty consistent in my messaging to her; her dad struggles more, sometimes speaking of his own diets and characterizing certain eating behaviors as "good" and "bad." (Sigh.) 

So last night, she was modeling a new bathing suit, worrying about every possible detail -- is it too baggy in the butt? Does it highlight her breasts too much or is it just that she's never had breasts before and they feel weird? -- when she said: "I think I'm getting thinner. Do I look thin in this?" 

Me: "You know we don't think, talk like that. That's a beautiful color on you and you look wonderful in it." 

Daughter: "But would the kind of person who does care about thinness think that I look good in this suit?" 

My brain still hurts. 

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Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

CW: As I discussed last week, a lot of what I do here is help people with thin privilege unpack our anti-fat biases. All of the questions today deal with explicit fatphobia, two of them reference weight loss, and the second question on this list contains a lot of deep biases. I’m answering it because she’s saying a lot of silent parts out loud and I think that’s worth unpacking. But if you’re not up for those types of discussions today, feel free to skip this one!

Q: I'm pretty close with both my mom and my sister.  However, a common topic of conversation (in person and in our group chat) is, "look how much weight [this person we all know] has gained!" Almost any time my mom runs into someone I went to high school with, for example, she'll note what their body size is now. My mom and I (like virtually every human being on earth) have both gained quite a bit of weight since high school, so it feels especially odd to note. And my mom is deeply entrenched in diet culture, and is almost constantly engaged in some level of restriction. I never really know how to respond to this information.  I'd love to have a response that would signal "I don't care about people's weight" but also "have some compassion for your changing body." 

“I don’t care about people’s weight. How about we have some compassion for changing bodies?” is… maybe a perfect response? Can I write you a better one? Because you’re right. It’s odd to notice when adults no longer have their childhood bodies, which is what your mom is doing when she comments on someone’s post-high school weight gain. Especially because these are rarely positive or even neutral observations. When we engage in this kind of body talk, we’re always also comparing, judging, and grading someone’s success as a human by their size. This is stigmatizing, both to the people in question and to fat people more generally. And whether you’re fat or thin, it’s not a good conversation for you either. I’m curious how you would feel if your mom’s comments were about people’s race or gender identity. Would it feel easier to speak up because the right and wrong seems more clear-cut? The answer might be no, of course. It’s hard to tell people they are being racist or biased in other ways too! But I think these weight comments are especially hard to address because they make us feel so vulnerable, by triggering the incorrect but long-conditioned belief that our bodies are our fault. 

So I think what you’re really asking here is: How do I have this hard conversation with someone I love? Because you’re worried about hurting her feelings, or making things uncomfortable—even though she is already making it uncomfortable. And maybe because you’re worried about what she really thinks of your body, or the potential for rejection if she were to understand that you are choosing to divest from diet culture, a deeply harmful system that she’s still wrapped up in. 

It can help to start with compassion for her struggle. I’m not sure how old your mom is, but here’s why the grandparents are not okay. Her own experiences don’t justify her causing harm to others, but they may explain why it’s so difficult for her not to notice weight or engage in restriction. To that end: I’d focus more on the comments she makes about other people than her discussions of her own restriction. They are both harmful, of course, but it may feel more neutral to set a boundary around talking about bodies in general. You can toss in, “oh man, let’s not talk about people’s weight! Having a body is so hard!” the same way you might say “oh let’s not get into politics!” and then quickly move on to another topic. 

Talking about her own eating habits, on the other hand, may feel more invasive or judgmental to her (even though, I know, she’s the one volunteering this information!). And, it’s not your problem to fix. But you can let her know that you’d be a safe person if she does ever want some support in letting go of the diet culture noise living rent-free in her head. 

If she seems genuinely curious about why you’re opting out of weight talk, you can share more about articles you’ve read, podcasts you’ve listened to, or the questions you’re asking. Since you’re otherwise close, you might even be able to talk about your own experiences and how they’ve motivated you to stop dieting or be more weight-inclusive. Personal stories usually do the most to change people’s minds on controversial issues, especially when we can say, “I used to feel this way too…” But this kind of sharing is also the far more vulnerable way to engage. So don’t feel bad if you sometimes just let the anti-fat comment sail by. We can’t fight, let alone win, every battle. And you and your mom hopefully have many more years of group chats and conversations ahead of you. This can be something you chip away at slowly. We are, all of us, going to be working our way out of anti-fat bias (and every other kind of bias) for the rest of our lives. 

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Q: I’m a straight size woman in my 20s. I’ve been aware of HAES/anti diet culture/intuitive eating stuff for awhile and I’m really struggling with applying it to myself. Part of me honestly doesn’t see the need to, and I’m wondering if that’s such a bad thing. 

I’m currently in the “normal” BMI category, though closer to overweight, and ideally I’d like to lose [REDACTED] pounds and maintain it, though I’m not overly concerned with that. I think the weight I’m at now is a pretty good one for me. A couple of years ago I weighed [REDACTED] pounds more than I do now —the biggest I’ve ever been—and I lost the weight gradually and have kept it off since, staying the same size. 

When I was heavier, I didn’t like the way I looked or felt. My weight gain was the result of depression and using food to comfort myself. It was not a healthy coping skill by any means.

What if I just don’t want to be fat? What if I prefer the way I feel (physically) and look (aesthetically) when I’m on the slimmer side? What if intuitive eating and following my cravings for me looks like eating Wendy’s for lunch and Taco Bell for dinner, with lots of ice cream in between? That kind of food doesn’t make me feel good, it only provides momentary comfort. I don’t want to deprive myself, I want to have a balanced diet that’s mostly healthy with treats in moderation. And yes, for me some foods really are better than others when it comes to health, energy, etc. 

I realize this is not the kind of question you usually answer, so feel free to ignore it. I’m just puzzling some of this stuff out for myself and found it helpful to write my thoughts out. Your newsletter has been really fascinating to me because in a way it’s so alien to the way I think, and I’m wondering if I need to change. But at the same time, I feel pretty happy and healthy and not obsessed with food or dieting. I appreciate the work you do even if I don’t always understand or agree with it. That’s all, thanks for reading.

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Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore, has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

Q: How do I talk to my kid about her growing physicality (she’ll break the stroller if she climbs into it, she could really hurt someone with a shove, etc) without just saying, “you’re too big!”?

What this question brings up for me is another question: Would you be worried about this if you weren’t, on some level, equating “big” with “bad” yourself? Let’s step back: If “big” isn’t bad, then there is nothing wrong with a young child knowing that they are now too big for the crib, the highchair, the stroller, the snowsuit they wore last winter and so on. Growing and getting bigger is pretty much their whole job, after all. This kind of change is unequivocally good. But it does mean things are different than they were before. And yes, some of these milestones may feel bittersweet to them and to us—my 4-year-old likes to feel nostalgic for how she slept in a bassinet by my bed as a baby, something we did for less than three months/before she had conscious memory—but they are also joyful because getting bigger means they can do and experience so much more of the world. 

So I think using “you’re too big now!” in a matter-of-fact way to explain why your child no longer rides in the stroller is a great way to start practicing a more neutral and inclusive way of talking about bodies altogether. Consider it a baby step on your way to reclaiming fat with your kids. And it’s pretty easy to pair that explanation with a reminder of what your child can do with her new size: “You can run and jump now!” “You get to sleep in a big kid bed!” 

If “you’re too big for this” comes up in a way that does seem hard to reframe, you could swap in “you’re too old for that now,” since kids do pretty universally love getting older. (We’ll set aside for the moment how fast that stops being true for adults!) You can also remember that body size is relative to the world around it. It’s not our bodies’ fault that the jeans don’t fit. And it’s not her body’s fault for not fitting into the stroller, it’s that this particular stroller wasn’t made to fit her body. 

But I would suggest a different approach for your example of shoving. The ability to hurt someone with a shove is not tied to body size as much as it is to strength, impulse control, and emotional regulation. If you make shoving about her body size, you are (unintentionally) reinforcing the negative stereotype that larger bodies are more dangerous and unruly.  If you have to discuss her body to explain why shoving is unsafe, I’d talk about her being strong, not big. But an even better option would be to talk about why shoving isn’t okay because it means touching other people’s bodies without their consent, and in a way they probably won’t like. It might also help to get into how she can process the emotions that led to the shove, or to say something like, “you’re still learning how to be gentle with your friends.” It’s also fine to keep it simple with: “I won’t let you shove.” Because that’s a reasonable rule to have for kids at every age and every size. 

Q: I was wondering if you could address some topics for those of us who came to the party late and are now engaging in intuitive eating and rejecting diet culture after we already raised our kids with a diet mentality. My children (now 20 and 21) were raised while I was studying/working as a nutritionist, deep in diet culture and dealing with my own disordered eating. I discovered intuitive eating about two years ago and told my kids about it, and that things in our house would be changing. 

My older daughter (who has a history of anorexia and orthorexia) jumped right in and is now an intuitive eater and no longer engages in disordered eating. My younger daughter, however, who never had an issue with disordered eating, seems to be testing the boundaries of my commitment to let her eat whatever she wants. What do you do when your 20-year-old orders two milkshakes for breakfast or eats a full pint of ice cream every night or goes to McDonald’s for lunch and Taco Bell for dinner? 

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Q: I'm in the middle of my first trimester with my second baby, and for the first time in a while, my relationship with food feels truly wonky. In my first pregnancy, I was lucky to avoid experiencing any nausea or many food aversions and so my relationship with food overall felt pretty stable. I definitely did a lot of work with the feelings of restriction that came up around the foods/drinks you aren't able to have while pregnant and also to honor the increased hunger signals at all times of the day, but overall it was a season of huge growth in my intuitive eating journey and relationship with my body.

But this time around I feel both extremely hungry and very nauseous most of the time, and it's really throwing me off in my relationship with food and my body. It seems like no matter how much I try to honor my hunger and cravings freely, I still end up misjudging signals and end up overly full, overly hungry, or just dissatisfied half the time. Do you have any advice on how to give myself grace in this season while also not allowing these challenging experiences to send me backwards in all the progress I've made to find food freedom and body peace?

I think the most important thing we can do here is reframe this feeling that you end up “misjudging signals.” I can see why it feels that way when you eat something and it doesn’t sit right, and then you’re super full or super hungry or just… not happy about it afterwards. But the thing about pregnancy, especially a pregnancy with a lot of nausea, is the signals are just haywire. A food that sounds appealing in the abstract is revolting on the plate; what feels like wildly intense nausea turns out to be hunger and vice versa. There really is no getting it right. There is only survival. 

Diet culture teaches us to take full responsibility for how we feel after a meal. If you feel “too full” (and how do we even define that amorphous concept?) you are supposed to interpret that as failure and plan to atone for it with a more restrained form of eating in the future. But we simply cannot always predict how our bodies will respond to a meal, and that’s especially true during pregnancy. Even if we could predict, sometimes you want to keep eating past hunger because something tastes so good, or because you need a little extra comfort. Or maybe you’re so focused on the conversation at the table and pay less attention to what you’re eating, and honestly, how delightful does that sound, to be enjoying a conversation that much? How much less fun would food be if we all ate every meal with some kind of barometer finely tuned to catch the precise moment when we reach “full enough?” I know proponents of mindful eating will defend that concept and say no, no, no, that one square of chocolate tastes all the more amazing when you take 30 minutes to fully savor it. But I can’t actually think of anything more boring. The narrative around “fullness” as a pass/fail concept turns intuitive eating into the Hunger/Fullness Diet. But, feeling full—even too full, even Thanksgiving-dinner-stuffed— is not a failure. It’s just a sensation. Sometimes, a really nice, satisfying sensation. Sometimes, an uncomfortable one. Either way, it’s temporary and your body knows what to do with the food. 

We should also talk about the pregnancy-specific pressure you’re facing around food. Because our culture grades pregnant people constantly: Are you meticulously taking your prenatal vitamins? Just saying no to wine and sushi? Getting enough protein, leafy greens, prenatal yoga? Good work, Mom! We talk about “building a healthy baby” as if we’re actually assembling them like so many Mr. Potato Head toys. All of these messages about the importance of prenatal core workouts and birth plans are ostensibly about empowering women, so we feel ready and able to withstand the rigors of pregnancy, childbirth, and presumably, parenthood itself. But pretty much as soon as that line appears on the pregnancy test, they become an impossible set of standards that we use to judge each other. And there is no power there.

A better way to move through the next months of your pregnancy might be to give yourself full permission to eat what sounds good (letting go of whether it’s “balanced” or perfectly nutritious) and also full permission to not feel great afterwards. To be clear: It’s frustrating as hell that you have to feel miserable so much of the time in order to make another human. If cis men had babies, well, our entire society would be different and better but also they sure as hell would have spent $50 billion figuring out pregnancy nausea. But none of that is your fault, or your body’s fault.

And if that doesn’t help and you’re still struggling with intrusive thoughts around food, I’m also here to say, you deserve professional support. Here’s a list of anti-diet, Health At Every Size and intuitive eating providers who specialize in disordered eating recovery. Sending you good thoughts and all the Extra Toasty Cheez-Its and Diet Coke (my own personal pregnancy survival strategy).  

Editor’s Note: A wise reader pointed out that the language in this post was not gender-inclusive. I have corrected “Because our culture grades pregnant women constantly” to “pregnant people,” and added the all-important “cis” to “If men had babies.” (Trans men having babies happens all the time and nobody is figuring out their pregnancy nausea!) Thank you for holding me accountable and helping me learn. —VSS

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Q: My 2-year-old wants food every time she sees it, even if she just ate. She’s good at asking for food when she’s hungry and we don’t have limits on meals and snacks, but if I’m putting something in the pantry and she sees snacks, she demands them. I don’t want to be restrictive but also want her to be able to listen to her hunger, not just her eyes! 

I checked in with my girl Amy Palanjian of Yummy Toddler Food on this one because I think I have personally blacked out a lot of what is difficult about feeding this age group. (Is it everything? I seem to remember it was everything.) “First, leave the possibility open that she is actually hungry, even if she just ate,” Amy says. Toddler appetites are weird and mercurial this way. It sounds like she’s able to eat her fill at meals and snacks, but for little kids who are prone to that “one bite and done” approach to meals—because moving/playing is so much more interesting than sitting and eating—it can be helpful to ask them to check in with their tummies and see if they need any more food before they’re excused. I often say, “Can you check how your tummy feels? Will it be full till [next eating opportunity]?” as a way of reinforcing our (loose) eating schedule. (The key here is to respect whatever answer they give you—otherwise this kind of question can turn into a passive aggressive form of pressure.)

But yes, humans are also hard-wired to respond when we see food and this is a feature, not a bug, except when you’re just trying to put the damn groceries away and have a small person clinging to your leg demanding crackers. “I think it’s likely that she’s just happy to see food she loves and is having a normal reaction of wanting to eat some of it,” says Amy. I love that framing because it takes the power struggle out of the equation: We don’t need to see this as bad behavior, or a kid being “obsessed” with or “addicted” to snacks. She’s just being two. And also, honestly, four or eight or twelve or forty—we all get excited when we see foods we like! 

The real trouble with this at age two is that she doesn’t fully grasp time or object permanence. So while I get excited when Dan unloads the box of Extra Toasty Cheez-Its from the Walmart haul, I also know that the Cheez-Its will still exist in the cupboard once he closes the door and that I can come back and eat them later when I’m actually hungry for them. That’s all a lot murkier for a toddler. Amy suggests saying something like, “These Zbars are delicious. I love them too! Would you like to put one on the counter to have for snack after we play?” (Or insert-any-other-logical-but-not-too-far-off-time here.) “Give her the chance to claim the thing she wants and save it in a special place, while you stay in charge of the schedule,” Amy explains. “Then deliberately go do something else together. Yes, she may have feelings about this and that’s okay.” Don’t withhold the food longer if she has a tantrum about it. In fact, it may help to keep the time between seeing the snack and eating the snack short to start. As she learns that you always follow through on a promise to eat a favorite food, she’ll be able to understand waiting longer. 

One last thought: Because this is such a human tendency, it’s also perfectly okay to say, “yes, I got your favorite cookies! Do you want some while I’m putting the groceries away?” As I talked about in last week’s solo episode, my version of this struggle is a preschooler who often wants snacks right before dinner. For years I’ve thought of this as some kind of failing on both of our parts, until someone recently said to me, “You know how adults like appetizers?” Right. We do. It’s also true that adults can eat appetizers and still participate in dinner and a small child who has filled up on impromptu snacks will be much less interested in joining you at the table. Regardless, it’s useful to consider how much our objection to a kid’s poorly timed food requests is based on a valid assessment of their/our needs—and how much comes from a diet culture tendency to demonize all snacks and displays of food enthusiasm. 

Q: My son’s guitar teacher lost 50 pounds from Spring to Fall. I’ve avoided mentioning it, as I stay away from complimenting weight loss. But I feel like she’s fishing for a compliment, and I’m unsure what to do. Should I stay silent? Or is it better that I acknowledge her weight loss?

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But BEFORE THAT: On this Thursday’s audio newsletter, I’ll be speaking with Nyemade Boiwu and Janet Conroy-Quirk, the creators of the National Plus Guide, a directory and community by and for fat folks and their allies. The goal of the directory is to make it easy to identify and locate safe, comfortable spaces for larger bodies. If you haven’t already, consider subscribing so you don’t miss our great conversation about inclusivity and allyship! (More about all the benefits of a paid Burnt Toast subscription here.)

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Now, onto this week’s question(s): 

1. I’m trying not to put limits on food for my kids but I’m really struggling with the question of sugar-filled foods, which my son craves and tends to OD on if he has the chance. He has ADHD so he’s more inclined to seek out sugar/carbs because of the dopamine surge they provide. What do we do when the notion of “no food is off limits” clashes with what’s indicated for other conditions our kids might have?

2. Related to the idea of no limits, my 3.5 year old daughter loves to ask for food after she’s gone to bed, brushed teeth, etc. The issue I have is not with giving her more to eat, but that I want her to internalize that after you’ve brushed teeth, no more food (cuz it’s not good for your teeth). What are your thoughts on putting that kind of limit on kids?

I’m answering these questions together because they illustrate a very common tension in the conversation around kids, food and limits. On the one hand, we worry that our kids crave certain foods (sugar) too much, and will eat it to the point of making themselves sick if we don’t put in some limits. On the other hand, in our effort to give our kids full permission to eat, we can end up compromising our general parenting structure in ways that feel iffy.

So let’s start by reviewing what we know about sugar in general: The research shows that sugar highs are a myth, as I reported for the New York Times last March. What parents perceive as kids getting crazy when they eat sugar is more likely the craziness induced by birthday parties or holidays in general. It’s also often one way they respond to our complicated (and even unspoken) feelings about sugar. Restriction and disapproval breeds fixation.

Sugar is not physically addictive. I touched on this in my recent piece on processed foods, but the concept that feels most important for parents to grasp is “habituation.” Food—including sugar, but quite unlike physically-addicting drugs or alcohol—is a substance we both need and habituate to, meaning the more access we have to it, the less we crave it. In fact, when researchers try to hook rats on sugar, they can only achieve this “addiction” by first starving the rats. In other words, what looks like addiction might be a pretty reasonable response to dieting.

Human studies on sugar or other forms of food addiction also fail to control for how much dieting is a factor in the eating experience. And yet: “We know the vast majority of people who struggle with food addiction are recurrent dieters,” says Sumner Brooks, RDN, co-author of the forthcoming How To Raise an Intuitive Eater (yes, go right ahead and pre-order that now). And it’s the deprivation caused by dieting (or other forms of restriction) that triggers our sugar cravings.  “People who have been restricted, dieted or food insecure in the past may experience a constant looming emotional threat of deprivation, which makes their drive to eat sugar even more intense,” Sumner explains. This threat of deprivation may linger even long after someone has begun eating enough; it’s often a big part of what drives binge eating. “This can certainly look and feel like addiction,” Sumner notes. “But it’s not the same as how addiction works with alcohol or drugs.”

Habituation is often really hard for folks to believe in, because most of us have lived with restrictive ideas around sugar for so long, we don’t even identify them as such. We use language like “he tends to OD on it” without thinking about how equating sugar with a potentially fatal substance like heroin sets up a restrictive mindset. (I’m calling this out with love. I’ve made those comments, too!) It’s almost impossible to separate our restrictive cultural beliefs about sugar from our experience of consuming sugar. And yet when researchers study the perceived dangers of sugar, this bias (just like anti-fat bias) is rarely named or measured. For a deeper dive into how our cultural biases around food and weight inform research on sugar and health, check out Christy Harrison’s recent newsletters. (That link is for paying subscribers only but her work is well worth supporting! Paid subscribers of Burnt Toast can also hear my recent conversation with Christy here.)  

Folks with ADHD are, of course, getting all the same messages around sugar and restriction as the rest of us. So again, it’s hard to tease out in the research when their sugar cravings are the result of diet culture and when they are a product of neurodiversity. But there is some evidence that people with ADHD eat more sugar than neurotypical folks, and as you mentioned, that may stem from their heightened dopamine cravings. That doesn’t mean your child with ADHD needs extra sugar limits, though. Instead you can focus on making sure he has plenty of options for getting the dopamine he craves (listening to music, playing video games, getting a hug, watching a funny show, etc) in addition to food. “If you’re helping your child find a variety of ways to get their dopamine bursts, then the occasional sugar dopamine burst is a-okay,” says Sumner. “Sometimes using sugar or other food this way is just the easiest option for parents.”

But let’s be clear: No child, neurodiverse or not, benefits from a total lack of limits around food. Letting kids eat whatever they want, whenever they want is fine for vacation or birthdays, but would be pretty disconcerting to most kids as a daily routine because they just aren’t developmentally ready to be in full control of feeding themselves. A total free-for-all gives them more responsibility than they can or should have to handle. So yes, you can and should have a house rule that we stop eating for the day after teeth get brushed. And you may want to institute a regular pre-teeth-brushing bedtime snack, so you can be sure she’s not going to bed hungry. This will make it easier to say no when she makes the post-bedtime ask: “We’re all done eating for the day, but we’ll have a yummy breakfast tomorrow!” (If she throws a fit, know that it isn’t about the food. I promise that my 3.5 year old is throwing the same fit at my house post-bedtime, only she’s demanding different socks. They are just doing what 3.5 year olds do when it dawns on them that life continues in the world after they go to bed.)

Telling kids that we’re not eating right now, but we will eat again soon isn’t putting food off limits—it’s putting food into a framework that makes sense for them. The problem is that parents are often confused about how stringent the framework needs to be, and try to control both how often kids eat and what or how much they eat when it is time to have food. You don’t need to be in charge of all of the things. You set boundaries around when eating happens in order to support kids in figuring out how much they want to eat when it’s time to have food. You make decisions around what food to put on the table in order to make sure kids can then decide how much (and which foods on offer) will be “enough.” So, when you serve sugar (and if you have kids who tend to sugar-fixate, you should serve it often!), you can just serve it and not worry about how much they eat—even if it looks like a lot. But when you’re not serving sugar, or it’s not time to eat, you don’t have to drop everything to cater to a kid’s food demand. Instead, acknowledge the validity of their request (“Oh yeah, I also love Oreos!”) and let them know when they’ll be eating it again (“should I put some in your lunchbox today?”).  

And—and I can’t underscore this part enough—do all of this the same way, with all of your kids, whether they have different neurological make-ups, different health concerns, different appetites, or different body sizes. Nobody benefits from thinking of foods as off limits. And every kid deserves to feel empowered to listen to and trust their body.

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Listen: This week I was one one of the guests on “Unforked” talking about parenting “healthy” eaters. Listen here.

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Q: I often have thoughts that it’s my fault my child is in a bigger body. Up until age 7, he was an average-weight kid, but since then, he’s gained a lot. He’s totally into technical devices, and there is no way to fix that. He loves to eat fatty and sweet food. Moving his body, or playing sports, are not his favorite things to do. So, now he is big and with his bigger body, his motivation to play outside is very low. He doesn’t even want to go to his soccer club anymore. Covid lockdowns and restrictions have had a deep impact too. 

I feel so guilty. Should I have been more consistent? Should I force him to go outside and play, or go to his soccer club? Should I forbid his most-loved foods? Should I force him to participate in family activities that he doesn’t like? I feel that forcing and forbidding is not the right way, because I’ll lose my connection with my child, which I think is of the utmost importance as he approaches puberty. But I’m worried.

You feel guilty because we are told that fat kids are failures. They are not. 

You feel guilty, because we’ve been told that fat kids are proof of poor parenting. They are not. 

You are parsing his eating habits and activity level because you are looking for an explanation for your child’s body. 

There might not be one. 

We blame ourselves because the “war on childhood ob*sity” has conditioned us to treat kids in bigger bodies like problems to fix. And it is true that kids are, on average, bigger today than they were a generation or two ago. In 1971, just 5.2 percent of American kids aged 2 to 19 met the criteria for ob*sity; in 2018 (our most recent data), 19.3 percent of them did. (Source, but CW for triggering o-word language.) But the fact that this shift has been so significant is proof that it’s not bad parenting. We are not, collectively, worse parents than people who were parenting young children in the 1970s. In so many concrete ways we are better. I explored intergenerational fatphobia in this piece a few weeks ago, but also consider how much easier it is (in most places) to be a gay kid today than in 1971! Or a kid who needs basically any kind of therapy!

We romanticize the free-range parenting of yore, but it’s important to remember that it wasn’t automatically healthier for every kid. It didn’t mean emotional stability, felt safety, or acceptance for every child, and it was always a model of parenting that worked best with a stay-at-home mom and a fair amount of financial privilege. (Also, they did not use car seats.) Whatever changes have contributed to kids living in bigger bodies today—and yes, of course, diet, activity level and screen time are the three places everyone goes with that question—they are not reflective of bad decisions made by bad, lazy, or uninformed parents. Our culture has changed, and one of the biggest changes has been the rise of modern diet culture, and its subsequent infiltration of public health and parenting discourses. 

As I wrote for Slate earlier this year: 

Even before a child is born, parents are told that we’re responsible for their body size. At practically every prenatal visit, an expecting mother hears that what she eats, how much she moves, and what she herself weighs during pregnancy will influence her baby’s birth weight. As a child grows, we’re told that how we feed them and whether we keep them active enough will determine whether they stay at a “healthy weight.” But growth trajectories and body size are driven by many factors, including social determinants of health, like a family’s socioeconomic status, food security, access to affordable health care, access to safe outdoor spaces, and lived experience of oppression, stigma and trauma. And even if a child has access to all the fresh vegetables and bespoke play spaces in the world, they may still be fat, because more than 100 different genetic factors, interconnecting in more than 300 ways, also play a role, according to a 2007 report by the British government. Parents affect exactly none of those genetic factors by banning ice cream or strapping on Fitbits.

To put it more simply: “We get the message that being a good parent means having a child in a certain-sized body, but I like to remind parents that they are not in charge of their child’s weight,” says Anna Lutz, a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders and family feeding and blogs at Sunny Side Up Nutrition. Anna told me that when I interviewed her for this New York Times piece on kids and pandemic weight gain; and she’ll be joining us for Thursday’s audio newsletter to unpack the concept even more.

So, that’s where your big picture guilt around this issue comes from. It’s not about your kid, his body, or his feelings about the soccer club. But I know you still need to navigate that situation. Let’s start by unpacking some of the implicit anti-fat bias underpinning your concerns. Remember that implicit bias means we’ve internalized a belief without recognizing its stigmatizing potential. So I’m not blaming you for having these thoughts; we all have these thoughts. I’m identifying them so we can acknowledge the stigma and reframe them together.

The first is the way you’ve connected his lifestyle habits (using devices, eating certain foods, not liking sports) to his body size. The relationship is never that literal. As Anna explains in Thursday’s newsletter: “This assumption that because someone’s in a larger body, the pediatrician then needs to figure out in what way that child is ‘eating too much’ is not even based on any fact that children in larger bodies do eat more. Research shows that children in larger bodies do not eat more than children in smaller bodies.” This is also supported by my own life experience as a formerly thin kid who lived for Nickelodeon and found every excuse to sit out gym class. There are plenty of skinny kids who also live on their devices, eat sweets and hate sports—we just don’t pathologize those behaviors unless we can tie them to a pathologized body size.

Next, let’s unpack the assumption that his bigger body size is lowering his motivation to play outside or go to soccer. I hear this often; a dad I interviewed for that NYT piece told me that he thought his son’s pandemic weight gain was “making him really sleepy.” Body fat is not a sedative. But a child in a bigger body might resist physical activities if he expects to be teased or shamed while he does them. Or if he knows your primary motivation for his soccer playing is weight loss. 

But here’s the part of your question that made me stand up and cheer: I feel that forcing and forbidding is not the right way, because I’ll lose my connection with my child, which I think is of the utmost importance as he approaches puberty. Yes. A thousand times, yes. Banning favorite foods will only make him want them more. Forcing the soccer club or other activities he hates will similarly backfire, especially if he knows the prescription is rooted in body shame. Your child needs radical acceptance of his body. He needs to know he’ll have access to his favorite foods, even if you’re serving less-preferred options alongside them. (This article offers more specifics on the approach I like best for this.) He needs time to pursue the activities he loves without worrying that they aren’t physical enough. He also needs space and support to explore ways he might enjoy moving his body—but he won’t feel safe doing that if he’s worrying about what his body represents to you, or to other people around him. 

This kind of acceptance isn’t easy to achieve, especially because people around us are so likely to tell us we’re doing it wrong. The pediatrician’s office is, maddeningly, ground zero for these kinds of conversations, especially right now. Every time we go, we’re shown where our child falls on a growth chart, which means comparing our own, individual, autonomous child to this swathe of faceless same-aged peers. That’s a tough enough starting point, but it gets more complicated when pediatricians treat growth chart percentiles like grades, as Fanny Sung, a 39-year-old mom and dietitian in Nashville found out when she took her 6-year-old in for a physical recently. 

“He’s always been in the 60th to 70th percentile, but at this visit, his weight shot up to the 90th percentile,” she says. Fanny says her pediatrician zeroed in on that number—ignoring the fact that her son’s height had also climbed—and commented that she was “seeing so much of this right now,” with kids in remote school. “She told us that he should only drink one juice box per day,” Fanny says, even though her school district has been distributing two meals per day, seven days a week to kids during the pandemic—and every meal includes a juice box. “I explained that we don’t restrict our kids’ food in any way, but she just pressed in more.” (And for everyone recoiling about juice right now: Yes, taking the juice box off of a child’s lunch tray because you’re worried about their weight is a form of restriction—especially when they know all of their friends get the same meal and get to drink the juice.)

Fanny emailed me wondering if she should tell her pediatrician not to talk about weight at her kids’ appointments and yes, that is always an option; Anna and I will discuss the best ways to do it on Thursday. But before she did that, Fanny decided to engage her pediatrician in a conversation about her anxious approach to weight. At their next appointment, Fanny asked the doctor to explain her approach to growth charts. The doctor’s response was frustrating, but not surprising. “She told me she doesn’t have a ‘better’ way to assess growth and that both BMI and growth charts can give her some clues to start asking questions about a family’s lack of physical activity or ‘excess junk foods,’” Fanny reports. But if what if pediatricians asked these questions of all kids, regardless of body size, since physical activity benefits everyone? While we’re at it, what if pediatricians didn’t demonize the foods kids understandably prefer, which only plays into their forbidden food allure?

“I do feel for her; her education and knowledge is to ‘protect’ the kids she sees from what she deems as ‘obesity-related diseases.’” says Fanny. “But I take issue with that.” I do too, for all the reasons we’ve already talked about. But I love how Fanny left things: “I let her know that my kids will be what her charts and graphs will consider ‘overweight’ at some point, because I was and so was my husband,” she says. “And I told her, I am okay with that.” 

Kids’ bodies are growing, and this means they are constantly changing. And it’s normal to have phases of growth where kids look rounder or bigger. Sometimes they lean out a few months or years later. Sometimes they don’t. Some of us are going to be fat and that has to be okay with the people who love us.

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Marginalized by medicine: In my latest article for Health, I report on the importance of a culturally competent approach to healthcare and medicine. Systemic racism and other structural issues mean people of color and low-income individuals often receive substandard care, or are discouraged from seeking the care they need; instructing providers in culturally competent healthcare can start to undo that tangled and toxic knot. Read more here.