“The main problem with the BMI is not that it sometimes thinks thin people are fat. The main problem with the BMI is that trans people who exceed a certain BMI can't get life saving, gender affirming care. The main problem with the BMI is that there are surgeons who will not operate on fat people and require them to lose hundreds of pounds before they can access X, Y, or Z surgical procedure that they desperately need. But magically, they absolutely can manage surgery when it's weight loss surgery.”
You're listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fat phobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.
I recorded this intro like six times because they got way too gushy every time, but today I am so excited to be talking to Aubrey Gordon. If you don't know Aubrey, she is the co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast. She is also the author of what What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat and her brand new book, which is out this week. Run, don’t walk, to get "You Just Need to Lose Weight" And 19 Other Myths about Fat People.
I'm going to let us get right into it because Aubrey is awesome and this conversation is a total delight. So here's Aubrey!
PS. If you missed Aubrey’s last Burnt Toast episode, you can catch up here.
Episode 76 Transcript
Virginia
Okay. So I am looking at your childhood scale.
Aubrey
Yeah, you sure are.
Virginia
What is happening.
Aubrey
So I am in Los Angeles. I come down here for a good chunk of time at the end of each year. Since I started freelancing, I was like, I would like to spend more time with my family. So I do. And the one place that I can record while I'm down here—which is a big part of my job, recording audio.
Virginia
It is.
Aubrey
You know, it's Los Angeles! It's the second largest city in the country, hard to find a truly silent place. So, I'm inside my mother's closet, which just works on a number of levels, yes? And one of the things that she stores in her closet is the scale that we had in my childhood. It's one of those, like, if you went to a doctor's office in the 70’s, maybe?
Virginia
It's not a small digital scale. It's tall. It has the weights that slide back and forth. It's a full-on doctor's office scale.
Aubrey
Your journalistic integrity is really shining through here.
Virginia
This was the scale your family had in your house?
Aubrey
Uh huh, absolutely.
Virginia
I also have the question of why do we still own the scale?
Aubrey
I don't know. She's told me she only uses it like a few times a year. She's a person who doesn't like things to go to waste.
Virginia
Yeah, and what do you do with that scale if you want to get rid of that? Like, how do you not waste it?
Aubrey,
Totally. And also, at this point, not only does she have not a lot of people looking for scales at this particular moment, but not a lot of people looking for big, heavy, loud scales from 50 years ago.
Virginia
It would be hard to give away, even on the freecycle page.
Aubrey
I was telling her she should take it to a scrap metal place. Or to an artist of some kind, like a welder could do some interesting things? I don't think any of that's gonna happen.
Virginia
No, I think it’s gonna stay in the closet there and you're going to see it every year.
Aubrey
It's the greatest icebreaker to every interview I have.
Virginia
It's very off brand and somehow on brand, also.
Aubrey
Yes, it is the absolute nexus of things I stand against and things I spend all of my time on.
Virginia
And stand next to, while doing your work.
Aubrey
But not stand on anymore!
Virginia
Yeah, not anymore.
Aubrey
I was like, I get to show this to Virginia today and that feels like a win to me. What a treat.
Virginia
So how are you doing? You are a couple of weeks out from book launch. How are you feeling? How's it going?
Aubrey
I mean, you know. Anytime you make a big thing and then there's like a year between when you make it and when people get to experience it, that's a year of always feeling a little bit like you're about to barf, you know? Just a tiny bit. Just always a low grade barf energy. So, I'm in the thick of that. I'm at the crescendo part of the barf energy.
Virginia
That makes sense.
Aubrey
But also, it's fine and great. And I get to talk to a bunch of fun people who I like talking to and it gives me an excuse to do that. How about you? You're how many months out now?
Virginia
It's the end of April. So I haven't reached peak nausea. But low-level-constant-background-noise-hum barf, sure. I'm getting second pass back this week, which I think is the last time I get eyes on it. But it's the week before getting we're going on a big trip for the holidays so I'm completely not in work mode. I'm trying to pack my kids up for this big trip and I have to read the book again. And I don't want to read it again. That phase where I can't look at it anymore. But also, what if I don't look at it enough and then something terrible goes in?
Aubrey
Even if you look at it seven times, you're gonna catch something at some point and feel bad about it. Because it's forever now.
Virginia
I don't pick up my first book anymore. Because I know if I pick it up, I will find something and just be like, why didn't we catch that? You can't look back at it at a certain point.
Aubrey
That's really smart of you.
Virginia
The whole pre-book-launch is a very weird phase. It's this liminal state you're in. But I'm so excited for you, because you're close to it being out, it being a thing.
Aubrey
It's happening. It's happening at this point. Whether I'm barfing or not, it's happening.
Virginia
With me barfing along for the ride!
Aubrey
And you, too! I'm so excited! The front end of this week for me is a ton of interviews and the back end of this week is spending a couple days with your new book. I'm over the moon about it. I'm so excited.
Virginia
You’re the best. I felt awful even asking, you have so much going on.
Aubrey
Listen, this is one of those things where I'm like this needs to be out in the world. This is the kind of thing that the world very desperately needs right now. As an elder millennial child of a boomer, most of my peers who have kids at this point are in this space of being acutely aware that their upbringing around bodies was fucked.
Virginia
It was a hot mess.
Aubrey
It was bad news. And they're like, “So it can't be that. But also, I don't know what else to do.”
Virginia
Exactly, exactly.
Aubrey
I feel like this is like gift of a set of tools. That's my hope. And sort of like an analysis for folks to go. You're not just rejecting one lens, right? You're applying a new one. Here's the new one.
Virginia
Once you start to see diet culture, once you start to name anti-fat bias, especially when it comes to kids, you now want to protect them from it. And that can lead to this all or nothing thinking that feels very familiar. People are like, “how do I get the schools to stop this? What media can my kid watch that won't be fatphobic?” And I'm like, “Are you just not going to show them a cartoon?” So, it's really about how do we give kids these tools, too? How do we normalize these conversations? How do we change the language in our household so fat is just a word that we're using all the time and not this loaded concept. Because we can't put them in these bubbles and be perfect in our anti-fatness, if that makes sense.
Aubrey
I kind of feel like everything we do in the system that we're currently in and the culture that we're currently in is just some measure of harm reduction, right? So it’s thinking about things through that lens and not through the lens of, “I'm going to somehow create a perfect bubble in which my kids will not be exposed to any of the like harmful forces that exist out in the world.” Because that is not reasonable. I feel like most parents I know, on most fronts, have gotten there. Just figured out we're in a messy world with a lot of messy stuff. And you're going to be in control of some of it and totally out of control of some of it. But I think that that can be a harder thing for folks to come to terms with around anti-fatness and bodies.
Virginia
I think it comes from that diet culture mentality of like, if I do X, Y, and Z, if I follow these rules, then it'll all be okay. And we're just applying that in a new way. So it just gets very tangly and we have to realize this is not something that there's five easy steps for, you know? There was never anything that there was five easy steps for, but for sure, not this.
And that gives us a great segue to your new book, because I think what is so exquisite about it is how it helps us start to do this work and ask ourselves these really hard, painful, difficult questions. But also, there's just this clear recognition in the book that the work is not ever going to be done, but we are going to keep doing the work.
Aubrey
I appreciate that. That's the goal, right? Everything's a mess, everything's hard. It's easy to get overwhelmed by how much mess there is and to be like, it'll never get cleaned up. We can't do anything, we can't have nice things, whatever. I had a conversation to this effect the other day with a health and wellness reporter, who was having a real galaxy brain moment around like, “I've never had a fat editor, I don't think I've ever worked with another health and wellness reporter who was a fat person. We use the language in our internal style guides, we use language of overweight and obesity with specific guidance around that being less hurtful to fat people and I don't think that's true anymore.” Blah, blah blah. And it felt like a little microcosm of what I see a lot of folks doing when exposed to sort of this set of information, which is just like so much overwhelm. And that turns into a sort of barrier to taking action.
Virginia
Where do I even begin to scale the mountain?
Aubrey
Totally. And like, it's all going to be messed up! All of our actions are going to be imperfect. But we are not living in a world where too many people are trying too many things to defend fat people, right? Like, that's not the world that we're in. There are many issues, there are many communities where you can try things and there's a pretty good body of writing and thinking and research about like why those things may or may not be super helpful. On anti-fatness there is a lot less research. And there is a lot less of a track record of people trying things and not having those things work out. I think for me as a fat person, the best thing somebody can do is try something. Even if it's wrong, the distinguishing thing at this point in my life as a fat person is people who try something. Because the people who don't do anything, I cannot distinguish from people who are deadset anti-fat people. The action is the distinguishing mark. And it's the thing that like gets us on a road to somewhere.
Virginia
Yeah, you can then start to evaluate what's helpful and what's not helpful, because we will be trying things as opposed to not doing anything and accepting this entrenched place. When you're talking about that less of a body of research, we are also seeing that what does work for other forms of bias doesn't seem to work as well here and trying to understand why that is.
Aubrey
Absolutely. Your conversation with Jeff Hunger about this was top notch on that front.
Virginia
Jeff was awesome. His work is so helpful.
Aubrey
He's so great. We're at a different point in this movement than we are in other movements, right? And I think it's worth noting, how far have we come? What have we been working on? And how are the sort of contours of this issue different than the contours of other issues?
Virginia
I feel like we skipped over the part where I should ask you to tell people what the book is and what it's about and what inspired it. So how about we do that real quick?
Aubrey
Great. Let's do it. So, it is my second book, and it's called, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths about Fat People. It came in part from a proposal from my publisher who has a series of books on myth busting. They've got books on immigrant communities, they've got books on unions, they've got books on a number of communities and issues that have been… willfully misunderstood, we’ll say. And I will be honest that—this is a weird thing for me to say, given the show that I co-host and the book that I am putting out now—I have a weird, conflicted relationship to myth busting because I think that we think it does more to change people's minds than it does. It's predicated on this very enlightenment era idea that if we're presented with facts, we change our minds. And I'm like, nah. We now have hundreds of years of evidence that that's not the case.
Virginia
People just dig in deeper on what they believe.
Aubrey
Totally. But at the same time, we've got more and more folks who are in that galaxy brain, I can't do anything mode. It felt really important to have something, to have a tool for those folks to be able to feel grounded enough in their own sense of facts and history to feel like they can handle what comes their way. We already kind of know how to get our parents to move off of outdated language, we already kind of know how to get our friends to knock it off when they're saying unhelpful things, right? These are all things that we know through our own relationships. And the barrier is more people feeling grounded and confident enough to say the things that they know how to say and do the things that they know how to do and work that change process with the people and institutions in their lives. This felt like an important tool for those folks. It could be for your jerky uncle who won't leave people alone about his fitness routine or whatever. But it could also be for you, the person who knows the jerky uncle with the fitness regime to figure out what your way in is.
Virginia
That's what I kept thinking about, reading it. You and I think and work on these issues quite a lot—some might say, obsessively. And yet, there are still moments where I'm in a store and they don't have my size, and I just sort of freeze and don't know what to do. The vulnerability takes over, right? And I just thought reading this, this is something you can come back to if you have one of those experiences. You can come back to this and be like these are my values, this is what I understand. Even if in the moment of facing the thing you've become untethered from that. This is a way of re-tethering yourself. It's just such a gift that way.
Aubrey
Oh, I'm so glad to hear it. My hope would certainly be like, you go to the doctor's office, you get your after visit summary, and it has your BMI in big bold letters, or your kid’s BMI or your partner's BMI or whatever. You can come back and hopefully read this chapter on the BMI and go, oh, right. It's nonsense.
Virginia
I will light this on fire.
Aubrey
Oh, right. I shouldn't feel sad and ashamed about this. I should feel angry and indignant. Oh, I'm so glad that you experienced it that way.
Virginia
How did you narrow it down to just 20 myths?
Aubrey
So the initial list was like 36.
Virginia
I would imagine.
Aubrey
But a bunch of them collapse into one another. I had a bunch of separate ones that were like, fat people are the biggest drivers of health care costs or X number of fat people die every year just because they're fat and they just drop dead. That's how science works apparently. And I had one about the obesity epidemic and the construction of the obesity epidemic. As it turns out, you can tell that last story and it will get you to all of the other stuff along the way.
Virginia
They're all recurring characters in each other's nightmares.
Aubrey
Totally. So to me, it felt more important to get to all of the information, whether or not there was a chapter title for it. And also like, if you do the health care cost one, that's like two pages. That's not much of a chapter. That's a leaflet. So I think it was much more figuring out how to choose some mother myths and figure out what the little tributaries were to those mother myths.
Virginia
I was just thinking about the planning of this book and thinking, there was probably a beautiful mind moment of like, where does it all go?
Aubrey
I definitely have an obsessive amateur investigator’s bulletin board covered in red string at my house somewhere.
How did you land on your book’s structure? Because parenting and fatness and body image is like, oh boy…
Virginia
What I wanted to do in the first chunk of the book was deal with the, quote, childhood obesity epidemic, because what I find so often is that even if adults are starting to question BMI and they're starting to grasp it about adults, there's something about “but the children” that's like this third rail where it's like, okay, but you can’t argue with childhood obesity not being terrible, right?
Aubrey
“We still have to be terrible to children.” It’s really one of those ones that, like, you can totally get where people are coming from when they say it. And also, if you spend like 15 seconds on it, you're like, oh no.
Virginia
Right. So I felt like we need to start there because that's the core terror that parents are carrying around. The “but my child,” you know? It's so easy to play on parental fears for children's health, wellbeing, happiness, etc.
Then the way I structured the rest of the book was to think about where are the instances in family life where fatphobia really lives and shows up. It's the dinner table, it's your kid’s classroom, it's coaches and kids sports, puberty, social media, these different arenas. So the rest of the book kind of marches through these different places, and asks, what does it look like? What are your things coming up? What are your kids getting from other people, from the teachers, the coaches? Who are all well-meaning hardworking people—I don't ever want to sound like I’m bashing teachers—but schools are a hotbed of anti-fat bias. Those are the questions I get from readers and podcast listeners, which I'm sure is similar for you. These are the things that come up over and over where it's like, we need to be able to tackle this.
Aubrey
Absolutely. And I would say for me—and I'm curious about this for you—there are a number of things that people say thinking that they are drawing an allegiance to a movement and they might not be recognizing those things might be undercutting the movement.
Virginia
Yes. You have some really good myths about that in the book.
Aubrey
And I would imagine there are lots of parents who really think they've hit on the thing and we're sort of like, “almost.”
Virginia
The number one example is parents who email me outraged that the pediatrician is upset about their child's BMI.
Aubrey
Oh, because they're “not that fat?”
Virginia
They’re not that fat.
Aubrey
Oh, so close, but also really far.
Virginia
Now you’re reinforcing the whole problem.
Aubrey
Now you're just going, “My kids shouldn't be treated like this because that behavior should be reserved for the fat kids and my kid isn't one of them.” Which is not what people mean to say when they're saying it.
Virginia
And they'll even come with like, “of course, nobody should be treated this way! But also, my kid is thin.”
Aubrey
It’s extra galling when they're definitely not fat. There's a similar thing with the BMI where people will do that—like, I'm sure you've seen this a million times—here's a picture of me, clearly socially defined as a thin person. The BMI thinks I'm fat. That's how you know you can't use it. And I'm like, that's not the biggest problem, right?
Virginia
It's really not. Shaquille O'Neal's BMI is hurting nobody. That's not the concern.
Aubrey
Yeah, The Rock is fine. We can all talk about The Rock being muscular and then the BMI thinks he’s fat. WHOAAA. And also, that is a real third rail.
Virginia
That is definitely one of those moments where I think people don't realize they're articulating their bias so clearly. And it's hard to figure out how to reflect it back. In a direct conversation, that doesn't always work. But you did a great job with that in—I'm looking at my notes now—Myth 14. “I don't like gaining weight, but I don't treat fat people differently.”
Aubrey
That one's a tricky one, because people are trying to draw this line vaguely around the idea of body autonomy, right? That this should actually be my choice that I get to do what I'm going to do and that doesn't mean anything about anyone else and my choice should be respected. Which is all true, right? All of that is true, you should totally be able to do whatever you want and see fit with your body. And also, because our brains are actually not that sophisticated to be like, I only believe this about me, but no one else in any other contexts ever. There is enough research and knowledge about implicit bias out in the world to know that that's not what we're doing, guys. That's not what we're doing.
Virginia
You didn't come up with your opinion about your own body in a vacuum with no influences from anybody else.
Aubrey
Your idea that you need to be thinner didn't come from nowhere, right? Here's where it gets really, really tricky. There is some data and some academic tools that actually use one's own beliefs about one's own weight loss as a metric for and as an indicator for how much anti-fat bias that person will have. If you believe, fundamentally, that weight is manipulable and people can control their weight across the board, including yourself, you are more likely to see fat people as failing to manipulate their own weight. Which is tricky. That's not the whole picture.
I think in all these conversations about implicit bias, the one thing that this should illustrate to all of us is that we are bad judges of our own biases. Part of the logic that this plays into is, “I didn't mean to hurt you, so I can't have hurt you” which cuts off any kind of continued relationship building. It cuts off any kind of accountability and changing course, right? It cuts off all kinds of things, because it says that my intentions matter more than anything that you might have experienced as a result of what I consider just to be my own good and pure intentions.
Again, it's tricky. I don't expect anyone to have escaped that completely. We live in a world that makes that impossible. But I do think it's an important thing to acknowledge that when we are pursuing weight loss, we are feeding ourselves a series of messages about what it means to lose weight, what it means to be a thin person and what it means to be a fat person. Those messages are also being fed to us by weight loss compliments from friends and family. Those messages are being fed to us by people who say, “I was really worried about you before” or “you looked really rough before and now you look great,” right? The idea that we could step outside of that constant stream and go, “but I'm making this decision only for myself and nothing else is influencing it.” It's just not really the world we live in. I would love it if it were, but it's not.
Virginia
I think we see that so much in healthcare, as well. The reluctance across—I shouldn't say across the board because there are lots of doctors who are trying to do this work. Because “Do No Harm” looms so large in that culture, they're like, “I don't mean to be biased against people, I have the best intentions about their health.” And then it's like, we hit this brick wall where we can't help them see that the harm is happening.
Aubrey
It is really fascinating. I wonder if you have encountered this much at all, I think particularly through Maintenance Phase this has come up more and more, that the number of health care providers and particularly MDs—which feels like a notoriously tricky pocket of healthcare providers to get to—the number of folks who have written in and gone, “all of my training was to do this.” Like, “for days and days and days on end, I was instructed and evaluated based on do I tell the fat patient they're fat. And now you're telling me I shouldn't be doing that. And now I don't know what to do.”
It feels really indicative to me of how few folks are getting meaningful feedback, are positioned in such a way and encouraged to take that feedback. And how few people have gotten an invitation into this conversation through any other mode than direct feedback from someone who has been harmed by their actions, which is a rough entry point for anybody, right?
Virginia
You're immediately on the defensive.
Aubrey
It has felt really striking to me how many folks are just like, “Oh, I've just genuinely never thought of this before.” And that part feels both disheartening and heartening.
Virginia
Yeah. Because they are thinking about it. I've been hearing from a lot of medical students lately, which is very exciting to me.
Aubrey
Same! Thrilling!
Virginia
Good job, med students. That's really cool. That gives me a lot of hope to think the new generation of doctors is grappling with this in a way that the current people you can see are likely not always.
Aubrey
Yeah, for sure.
Virginia
I had another experience like this. Recently, I had posted a coat I found and I was really excited. J. Crew had gone up to a 3x in this coat—obviously, not far enough, but it was encouraging for a brand like J. Crew. And then after we linked to the coat, in the newsletter, we got all these emails from readers being like, it's only going up to an XL. They’d erased the sizes. They were just gone from the website.
Aubrey
What?
Virginia
I know. Corinne put the link in on Tuesday, I double checked it on Wednesday, the podcast dropped on Thursday, and the coats were gone. Like, what? What is that? And so I was talking about this on Instagram, and this person DM’ed me, and they were saying, “Well, probably the coats just sold out.” And I said, “Well, if that was the case, the sizes would still be listed, because I can see the medium is sold out and the M is still there with a little line through it. These sizes are just gone.” And she was like, “I just think you're reading into it.” Like I'm reading into the sizes being erased. She was like, “I work in retail. I don't work for J. Crew but I work in corporate retail. And I think usually when that happens, it's because the size order has been sold out. The brand is probably really excited it's sold so well.” So excited that we’re no longer identifying it on the website?!?
Aubrey
They're doing a great job of showing that excitement.
Virginia
With their total lack of fat models and the fact you no longer see a plus size section on J. Crew. It was there for like five minutes and now it's gone.
It just was a fascinating conversation where I was like, Oh, you received this articulation of harm, which wasn't even about you. And immediately went to this place of “fat people are so defensive.”
Aubrey
Yeah, totally. And I think part of the thing that starts the catalyst of that response is being a fat person raising this issue. So I would say, particularly for folks who are not perceived as fat people, regardless of how you feel about your own body, if you're able to go into any store and buy clothes, congratulations! You have some measure of thin privilege. This is one of those conversations that would go potentially fundamentally differently if a thin person had that conversation.
Because I think one of the hard things about all this stuff is, I'm like, oh, man, you are just seeing my fatness. And me saying, as a fat person, anything—like fill in the blank for whatever. “As a fat person, I like lemon meringue pie.” “As a fat person, I didn't sleep very well last night,” whatever. Doesn't matter. All of those things are registering as you're clenching up in anticipation of some kind of negative feedback rather than opening yourself up to I wonder what comes next. Or I'll wait for this sentence to end.
Virginia
This is making me think of a question I just got from a mom that I want your input on. She's fat. Her daughter is currently straight sized and struggling with some teenage body stuff. And she said, “I feel like my input isn't landing, because she's looking at me and being like, well, you're fat,” you know? Like, it was like a credibility issue. And what do I do about that?
There's probably like some truth to that, if her daughter is thinking that thinness feels really important right now, trying to fit in in eighth grade or whatever. Thinness matters so much. Your fat mom's perspective doesn't hold so much water because she has “failed” to achieve the thing that feels so crucial to you. I have empathy for both of them. But it's one I've been thinking about and I would love your thoughts.
Aubrey
It's tough. It's such a tough one. Because then what do you do? What what do you do if you, as mom, are not a credible messenger in your own parenting? Ugh God. Yeah. I also have empathy for both of them. Particularly that mom’s position feels like a real gray-eyed Athena moment of like, you know everything that's about to happen and that you can't really intervene in the ways that you would hope or with the effectiveness that you would hope. God, that's a rough one.
Virginia
I do think we have research showing that parents influence teenagers, even when teenagers are not appearing to accept our thoughts or feelings. You do have more influence than it looks like you have in the moment. I mean, I see this even as a parent of a nine year old, who's often going on thirteen. It appears that I am having no impact and I'm the most mortifying person in the world, but actually I see through other actions that she craves my approval and trusts me, and that we have this strong bond.
So I would hope that there's that in play, that it may look like a reduction right now, but it ultimately won't be. It still feels really important for you to be modeling. that you can be a fat person who's good with their body, or even if you don't feel good with your body that you can be modeling ‘I am worthy of respect and dignity’ and all of these things. Because she may not always be thin. She needs to have that even if it doesn't in the moment connect. It's going to matter later on.
Aubrey
I just keep coming back to ‘Boy, that's a tough one.’ That's just an emotionally tough position.
Virginia
Well, it's a rejection from your kid, which just sucks. And kids are good at figuring out how to reject us and part of that is developmentally appropriate. They're supposed to be separating, but when it's over something like this? It's like the fear you're gonna raise a conservative, you know? These are really important core values that I want my child to be living.
Aubrey
I mean, I'll say this. There's a thing that my sister-in-law in particular does with her kids that I enjoy immensely, which is when they start doing the kid thing of like, '“don't be like this, don't show up in this way, and could you not wear bright colors? Could you not make too many sounds? Could you figure out how to disappear?” and she goes hard in the other direction. Like, “Oh, do you want me to wear this? What if I put on glittery eyeshadow? What if I showed up with a kettle drum and just started beating it going, “I'm their mom here I am.” It's both really fun and that's how she engages with the world anyway, right? Like, that's true to who she is.
But I think there's really something to go to the source of the anxiety and be like, “sorry, is this really what you're afraid of?” Like, my niece, at one point wanted me to watch her debate tournament—which was the most fun thing I have done a long time. It was on Zoom during the pandemic and she was like, “your camera needs to be off, you could probably just put in a different name. It can't be a picture of you.” Like, it was like all of these things. And I was like, “oh, man, I'm so sorry. Because I was really planning to show up in a leopard print sweater that just says ‘Proud Aunt’.” Like, I think there's some use to that kind of stuff, too, depending on the tone of the conversation, but it gives people a way out and allows them to see sometimes the kind of outlandishness of their particular their fears, you know?
Virginia
It's also saying to a kid in this situation, you can't really reject me. You can reject me but I am still your mom. I still love you, show up for you, still here in my fat body, being your mom. That is really powerful. Again, maybe not right now. But when I compare that to the stories I hear from readers who are looking back on parents who were ashamed of them, parents who were correcting and controlling them.
There's a great line—this was Myth 4: thin people should help fat people lose weight—and I really loved and underlined this line. “I love you doesn't ring so true when it's followed by ‘I just want to fix you.’” I don't think you were talking about parenting at that point, but that absolutely connects to parenting in a huge way.
Aubrey
For sure. I did policy change and community organizing for a long time before starting the work that I do now. And one of those campaigns was to ban so-called “reparative therapy,” ex-gay and ex-trans therapy, in Oregon, which we were successful in doing, which is amazing. Part of my job was to recruit witnesses and people who could testify about the impact of ex-gay and ex-trans therapy on their lives or on their kids lives. The thing that really stood out to me in that prep—like, I'm a gay person, those were really hard testimony preps to do. The thing that stayed with me the most and that feels like a lesson to transfer here is that 100% of the parents who signed their kids up for conversion therapy, thought they were doing the best thing for their kid. And I think it's one of those really hard, really human things. We can think we're doing the rightest thing and still cause harmful outcomes or still not know the whole picture yet or still not be far along enough in our own political education on an experience or an issue or a community to know how to make the right decision.
So I think just approaching all of this with enough humility and enough willingness to mess up along the way feels like really essential. Because even if we don't think we're messing up, we're definitely messing up. That's happening all the time whether or not we mean to. So being able to start from the place of “I might mess this up, but I'm gonna do something anyway,” feels really, really essential to all of this within and beyond parenting world, just like as a human.
Virginia
It's that balance of try something and be open to the feedback that what you're trying is not working. That's the combination we really need here, versus try something, be sure it's right despite the fact someone's telling you it was harmful because you didn't want it to be harmful.
Aubrey
For parents that I've spoken to who don't want their kids to be fat when they talk about what they're afraid of, they're afraid of social experiences of exclusion. And those are not fixed by not having a kind of privilege. And then having that kind of privilege, in my own experience with weight loss and weight gain, that makes it emotionally a lot harder to see what is available to you, but is being denied to you when you are fat, is a genuine heartbreaker. And I think it's worth flagging that, too, right? That like when your answer to the BMI is messed up because it thinks my thin kid is fat or I'm afraid if my kid gets fatter, they're going to be treated in such a way. The external conditions remain the same, You're just giving them temporary shelter. In a bus shelter of thinness, you're giving them temporary shelter.
Virginia
You're not giving them any tools to actually navigate through it. You're just saying the only solution is to make yourself into what they want.
Aubrey
Yeah, totally. You will probably become fat at some point in your life, or at least gain weight. And that will feel like a personal failure to you. And you will see all of this slip away, and you will blame yourself for not managing your own thinness appropriately. It comes from a good place of wanting your kid to be okay and to be treated well in the world. But I would argue that the answer to that isn't to spare them from the social context, but to fix the social context.
Even if your kid is a thin kid who's perceived as fat by the BMI, or even if your kid is afraid of getting fatter or whatever, the best thing you can do in all of those cases is make the world a safer and more dignified and more respectful place for fat people. And let your kids and loved ones and colleagues and friends and neighbors all see you doing that. That's where we start cooking with gas. I mean, that's where we really start going for it.
Virginia
The last thing I wanted to be sure to ask you about, because I think these will be helpful things for my audience to be thinking about, in the book and also on social, you've been talking a lot about the distinctions between diet culture, and anti-fat bias. And Myth 11 is about body positivity and that very footnoted version of “you can feel better about yourself, as long as you're happy and healthy.” I think there's some some really useful stuff we should talk about there because I think for so many people, the starting point is body positivity. The starting point is recognizing diet culture. And we need to articulate why that does not go far enough.
Aubrey
So I think whatever your starting point is awesome. Welcome! Come on down! So happy to have you! And I think it's important in any movement, in any issue, in any struggle, to make sure that your starting point is not also your ending point.
So, first things first, “body positivity is for anyone as long as you're happy and healthy.” I think this '“happy and healthy” phrase has become a real meme amongst people who are critical of diet culture without really thinking about what that means. What I would say to “body positivity is for anyone as long as you're happy and healthy” is: Depressed and disabled people deserve to feel okay about their bodies, right? Fat people and people who are not perceived as being healthy and people who are not perceived as being happy deserve to feel okay about their bodies. The last thing that people who are already being marginalized need is more caveats on what additional steps they have to take to be treated like they deserve to feel okay. Cause I don't know about you, I am a person who tends toward depression quite a bit. And I would love not to be written out of a movement space!
Virginia
Pretty fucking simple when you put it like that.
Aubrey
I mean, I think the other thing to know is that there is an eagerness that is part of the galaxy brain thing, it's part of the starting to recognize it everywhere, to label everything as a facet of diet culture. And what I would say is that if there is a bedrock here, the bedrock is not diet culture, the bedrock is anti-fatness. Diet culture does not exist without a profound fear of becoming fat, without a profound fear of being treated the way that fat people are treated. And without what social psychologists call “social distancing”—it's a different kind than the one that we've been talking about.
Virginia
Not the six feet kind.
Aubrey
Not the six feet kind. Going back to this “the BMI is wrong because it thinks some thin people are fat” stuff. That is a critique, like look at how cockamamie this whole thing is, that doesn't actually address that this is a thing that is very specifically on a daily basis, restricting life saving care for fat people.
The main problem with the BMI is not that it's sometimes thinks thin people are fat.
The main problem with the BMI is that trans people who exceed a certain BMI can't get life saving, gender affirming care.
The main problem with the BMI is that, because they are concerned with liability, there are surgeons who will not operate on fat people and require them to lose tens or hundreds of pounds before they can access X, Y or Z surgical procedure that they desperately need. But magically, they absolutely can manage surgery when it is weight loss surgery.
So, I think that identifying diet culture is a good thing. Like, that's a good thing to be able to do and it is a pressure that all of us face. What anti-fatness as a lens requires us to do is ask, not only is everybody paying a price, but who's paying the greatest price? And what would it look like to make life less punishing for the person who's paying the greatest price? Not only that, but who profits? Both who financially profits, but if you're looking at diet culture from a lens of ‘it hurts everyone,’ which sort of implies it hurts everyone equally, right? Then you go, Oh, these fat cats are getting rich, Weight Watchers or whatever. And you don't go, well hang on a minute, they are putting out a narrative that allows fat people to be seen as failures. But that's being put out so that thin people can see their bodies as accomplishments, right?
So, it's not just about what it allows you to believe about other people's inferiority—the perceived inferiority or failures of people who are fatter than you—but it also allows each of us to believe that because I'm not as fat as that fatter person, I did something right. And I should actually help them because clearly, I know how to do something right if it has lent me this body that is so much better than the body that they have, right? Like, which is a wild thing that I don't think most of us would say out loud. But that is absolutely sort of the underlying logic.
Everything looks like a nail when you got a hammer in your hand. If you're only looking for diet culture, you're only going to find diet culture. But if you look a little deeper and you look at who is this designed to hurt and harm, I think things that we label as diet culture or as food panic is considered classism and racism. It’s a very thin veil. Some of it is straight up anti-fatness, under a very thin veil or no veil at all.
If we want to dismantle these things, if we want to end them, we are going to have to get really precise about what we are personally impacted by and what we are personally not impacted by or what we personally benefit from. We talk a lot about diets and how hurtful and harmful they are,—including many, many straight sized people—without really reckoning with what that allows them to believe about themselves. And that feels like a really important part of the conversation, too.
Virginia
I really appreciate this, in the book and the way you're talking about it now because I write about both diet culture and anti-fatness and it can feel murky sometimes. It's just so helpful to remember, okay, I have to keep coming back to the the bedrock. It is useful to unpack things like perfectionism and these other concepts that are in the constellation of diet culture—I've been thinking a lot about diet culture in the home or other realms, but we have to keep bringing it back to the bedrock.
Aubrey
There are a bunch of those things that we consider to be facets of diet culture that are also facets of—like perfectionism—facets of white supremacy culture, right? Like, we've got to be able to hold multiple concepts in our head at once and say, Yes, I am hurt by this thing. And also other people are hurt in different ways.
Virginia
And way more probably, than me, a fairly privileged person.
Aubrey
This is the other thing that I would say is tricky about diet culture stuff. Often on the internet, where everything goes to get flattened and robbed of any nuance, we talk about diet culture as being two things: one, the effects on our internal lives and two, the result of some a amorphous culture that exists outside of ourselves, and not as something that we are interacting with, not as something that we are reinforcing, not as something even that affects other people differently than it affects us.
I think it can be a really tricky thing to figure out how to critique diet culture and only diet culture and still have a conversation about accountability and the mechanics of change. If you're just saying there's this big, scary, cloudy thing that is called diet culture, and then there's me and I feel really hurt by it. There are like a bunch more steps along the way and we got to be able to chart those steps so that we can take a different path at some point.
Virginia
It's so easy to stay locked in making it a personal project. That's what diet culture taught you to do in the first place, right? Is to treat your body as a personal project that you should always be perfecting and chasing these ideals, but also that keeps you from understanding the larger narrative.
Aubrey
Here's a question I've been getting asked a lot—and I imagine it's a question that you get, as well—when did you finally give up and see once and for all, that dieting was not the way and that you could just be a fat person?
And my answer to that is always like, there's not a point of arrival because you can't step outside of the culture that we’re in. Like, that's not a… no, nope.
Virginia
There’s no opting out.
Aubrey
But I think that is a question about a sense of liberation, like an internal feeling of liberation that is totally packaged up in a diet culture frame.
Virginia
Yes.
Aubrey
That question is like “when did you finally lose the baby weight?” or whatever, but for anti-fatness. That's a real lightbulb moment for me. Thank you for that.
Virginia
It's people looking for a solution that will fix their own thing, right? Which is so understandable, because there is a lot of pain around all of this. We are struggling to feel like we can put clothes on and exit our houses many days. And that is totally real. But it keeps the conversation in this personal project space, as opposed to this larger space.
Aubrey
And then any kind of further conversation about what would it look like to change it? Or what does accountability look like? Or what do you do when you accidentally play back into that thing? comes back to a sense of, you're somehow taking something away from my own personal hurt and harm rather than going, Oh, that's also hurt and harm and I should figure out how to help that person with theirs. And maybe they can help me with mine or whatever.
There's got to be some sort of sense that our own struggles have integrity and are not threatened by acknowledging that other people have different and sometimes bigger or more complex problems than the ones that we have. And that there are more responses to that than just being grateful that that's not you. Which doesn't help that person.
Virginia
Which is actually pretty patronizing. Because even if there was that moment—that's when it all clicked and I opted out and I was free of all of this—my answer wouldn't help anyone else. It wouldn't apply to anyone else. What works for you isn't gonna work for me.
Aubrey
For sure. God, I enjoy talking to you so much. It's been a minute and it's really fun.
Virginia
It’s really good to see you.
Butter
Aubrey
Listen, the thing that has been my butter most of all, is the thing that I would not recommend to people who have children nearby, young children in particular, which is I have been really enjoying Nicole Byer’s stand up. Folks may know Nicole either from her podcasting work or from Nailed It. Her stand up is almost entirely about her own sexuality and sexual experiences and she spends a bunch of time in that stand up playing with the audience's expectations of what her sexuality ought to be, as a fat person.
Virginia
That's super good.
Aubrey
It's great. Again, don’t watch it with kids.
Virginia
I mean, or do and be ready for some conversations?
Aubrey
Sure. Absolutely. The other one that I would say is much more fun and kid friendly is there's a show that I am an absolute fiend about a can't stop watching it. It is a show out of the UK called Taskmaster. Have I yelled at you about taskmaster?
Virginia
No, yell at me.
Aubrey
Okay. It's wonderful. They’re on their 14th season, so it's been around. Each season, there are five different comedians or performers who compete for the approval of another comedian who goes by The Taskmaster. His name is Greg Davis. And they complete these totally meaningless but deeply frustrating tasks, like get all three yoga balls to the top of a hill on a windy day. You have two hands, work it out. You're watching people get more and more frustrated about something they know doesn't matter. But they do know it's going to be on television. It fits into a similar category to like Nailed It, which is like don't take yourself too personally. Don't take yourself too seriously. Don't take any of this too personally kind of genre. And I just really enjoy it. One of my personal favorites is a task that is make the most exotic sandwich—the most exotic sandwich wins. One of the people makes one that is a full loaf of bread and between each layer is candy bars and marshmallows.
Virginia
Wow. Okay, well my kids would really love that.
Aubrey
So then the next task is whoever eats your exotic sandwich fastest wins.
Virginia
Good luck to you.
Aubrey
So again, just a recipe for frustration and watching people be thwarted but have a good time. Yeah, it's very funny and they have fully bleeped versions if you're nervous about any kind of swear words or any kind of inappropriate whatever, they make a fully bleeped family friendly version. It doesn't come up very often, but when it does, you might be glad it's there.
Virginia
That sounds excellent. Well, my butter is also a TV show. I was really laughing when you brought up Nicole Byers because my butter is a different flavor. It is Murder She Wrote reruns. Could not be more wholesome, like opposite of Nicole Byer in many ways, although you know, Angela Lansbury seems like she was a great hang. So yeah, probably they would be friends. But I think around the time you did your Maintenance Phase episode about her diet book—which was delightful, one of my favorites. I was like, Murder She Wrote! I used to watch it with my Grandma Betty. I would like fall asleep because I was like six and honestly, it's a slow moving show.
Aubrey
Yeah. The Pacing in the 80’s versus the pacing today.
Virginia
It's very gentle.
Aubrey
Very different.
Virginia
But I when I'm like between shows, like I'd finished Derry Girls. I'm working on a puzzle in the evenings and I just need something super mind erasing. It's also a good one to do a puzzle with becauseIt's fine if you miss some stuff. But it's just delightful. The reruns are on Amazon Prime.
Aubrey
I'll tell you this. I have a Murder She Wrote superfan in my life, somehow miraculously in my age peer group, where I'm like, wow, okay, great. Interesting. She watches it every night. And I found there is a cookbook called Murder She Cooked that I fully just sent to my friend and apparently is getting good reviews. So heads up. I found that while I was searching for the Colombo cookbook, which I'm eagerly awaiting now.
Virginia
I will say there was one episode where she gets like mugged on the streets of New York City and I was like, this doesn't hold up great on race relations. I don’t love it.
Aubrey
Correct.
Virginia
Don't love it, Angela. Don't love it. But for the most part, it's so low stakes because it's murder in her small Maine town that like it actually ages fine because it was never anything to begin with.
Aubrey
My childhood version of that was Matlock. Oh, the degree to which I would watch Matlock! And I'm imagining it's similar, like a mix of really weird, fully swing and a miss moments and then a bunch of stuff that was like, well, this wasn't au courant ever.
Virginia
But also, how great that there was a show with a—I don't know how old she was when she made Murder She Wrote, but she was at least over 25. She was allowed to be visible. It was ahead of its time in tiny ways, I would say.
Aubrey
The fixer of every murder in the murderiest small town in Maine. Cabot Cove.
Virginia
Why it keeps happening there. And the police, like have so much respect for her. They're like, yes, we do need you to come solve this.
Aubrey
“Thanks for your help, writer.”
Virginia
“Go back to writing your novel.” Oh, my gosh, Aubrey, this was so much fun. Let's make sure we don't forget to tell people where to find you, where to get the book, all that good stuff.
Aubrey
Absolutely. I am on Twitter and Instagram. You can get both of my books wherever you get your books. They are both out now. And you can listen to Maintenance Phase, if you want to hear us make fun of very silly diets and debunk them.
Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.
Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.
The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.
Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.
Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.
Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism. I’ll talk to you soon.
Share this post