High Priestess Roll Call
There are a lot of new folks here. Come say hi!
We are up another thousand people on the Burnt Toast list just since last Friday. So if you’re new and just getting your bearings, read this post. And since is this is our first Friday Thread since the book happened, I thought we should just do an old-fashioned round of intros. I’d love to know:
Who are you (name, age, etc all optional, of course!)?
What brings you to the anti-diet/fat justice conversation?
What’s your favorite thing to eat on a Friday night? (Mine is almost always Indian takeout.)
Friday Thread discussions are normally for paid subscribers only, but I’m going to make this one a free for all. If you love this conversation, I hope you’ll subscribe! If you team up with at least one friend for a group subscription, you can take 20 percent off. (This is also great for companies, schools and other orgs!)
PS. Please do familiarize yourself with my comment section ground rules! (Anti-fatness and general trollery is an automatic delete and block.) And thank you to everyone that makes this one of the few truly good places on the Internet.
Book Update: See You Next Week, CT, Boston and Internet!
On TUESDAY May 9, 7pm ET (Madison, Connecticut)
I’ll be in conversation with Crystal Maldonado, author of one of my favorite YA novels, Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, and several other wonderful books. This one is hosted Country School and my hometown bookstore, RJ Julia Booksellers! It’s always super special to do a book event there because I worked at RJ’s all through high school and college (a million years ago now). Register here.
On WEDNESDAY May 10, 7pm ET (Boston, Massachusetts)
I’ll be in conversation with my beloved
, one of my favorite novelists for grownups. This event is hosted by the Museum of Science in Boston; books will be available on site thanks to Harvard Bookstore. More info here.AND: My conversation with Lynn will also be live-streamed!
So register here for (free!) in-person or virtual tickets and we’ll see you there or be excited to know you are watching online!
Friday Links & Recs
ICYMI, I was on Good Morning America this week. (Yes, I sent them feedback on the stock photography choices!)
Also super thrilled to chat with
for this episode, which was co-released on Slate's The Waves and my beloved Mom & Dad Are Fighting.Delighted to be quoted in this Well + Good piece on “midsize.” Never forget:
LOVE this
piece for Romper on responding to family members' diet talk.Also this Fashion Journal piece on minimalist closets, inspired by my capsule wardrobe essay.
Somebody, Somewhere is back and it fills my heart with joy.
Jenny Craig is closing and putting over 1,000 people out of a job without severance.
We’re still not talking enough about the fact that men get eating disorders too.
Thrilled to see two greats (
and !!) in conversation together:
Have been leaning heavily this week on this brilliant advice from
:
If you read my piece on kids and FitBits, you also need this Maintenance Phase episode which breaks down alll of the science (or lack thereof!) of the 10,000 steps myth. Gold.
Snapped up another Geneva Dress in the Universal Standard sample sale and now waiting impatiently for it to arrive so I can live in it.
Laura, 64, mother of an almost 13-year-old. I came to the anti-diet conversation when I decided to give up dieting in 2018, but I still needed to do a lot of work on fat phobia.
And here's part of the story I wouldn't have told before this week, when I published a long personal essay at Scribd about some things that happened to me last summer, when I and almost everyone close to me decided to fall down. But it's the first time I've written at any length about the fact that my husband left me in early 2020, before the pandemic was under way. Then 61, I didn't feel great in my body and the most "natural" thing in the world would have been to try diet as a way to "transform" it because, god forbid, what if people thought my marriage ended because I was old and ugly and undesirable. (I'm working on ageism, too.) (Also, that's not why my marriage ended, I have a really good relationship with my ex and we are terrific co-parents, if I do say so myself. But that's how it felt, in early 2020.)
The single best thing I did, however, was NOT succumbing to the old coping mechanism of dieting because that's what dieting was for me, a cycle that went something like this: I feel bad about myself/I go on diet/People say nice things to me/I feel better. It is only lately that I realized how much I loved going on diets, like it was some sort of spiritual journey. I was addicted to the _cycle_. But I resisted the impulse to fall off the wagon and start dieting again. I stood up a little straighter. I started wearing the beautiful clothes in my closet, even if I had nowhere to go. And I began to work very hard on quieting the horrible judging voice in my head, the one that is far crueler to me than it was to anyone else.
Hi! I'm Rachel, 36, a rock singer/voice teacher/vocologist in the Boston area. I found Burnt Toast via MommaStrong, which I started when my now 4 year old was 6 months, and introduced me to intuitive eating and started me on this life changing path. Currently 22 weeks pregnant after an exhausting 18 month struggle with secondary infertility, and trying to maintain my gains in healthier relationships with food and my body while navigating pregnancy (with hyperemesis and GDM) and preparing for my first XX baby, who I know will face SO much more body and food pressure than my son does. So grateful that this community will be around for that. And that I can now send a copy of Fat Talk to my in-laws to try to help them understand why we're ok with our son having ice cream for dinner sometimes!