55 Comments
May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

This article reminded me of my embarrassment in the past when dealing with young childrens’ comments about my body…! The situation is slightly different because I believe up to a certain age children certainly aren’t trying to be hurtful with their comments, they are just trying to make sense of the world. I wish that instead of saying silent I spoke up though. To correct them. To say, oh, I’m just fat- and sometimes people are fat without being pregnant and that’s fine. Until recently, I didn’t think it was fine. I thought it was shameful for anyone to make comments on my size; it’s all my fault, etc., if I wasn’t so big in a way it wasn’t purposeful (read: carrying a baby), it was somehow terrible. But I noticed thin parents/teachers will be mortified by the comments of kids on bigger bodies too. And I guess just with kids especially, it can be a moment to learn about body diversity or question assumptions they may be learning.

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May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

I can't remember ever being mistaken for pregnant (to my face) even though I carry a lot of weight in the middle. But when I WAS pregnant, even at 8 or 9 months, people frequently expressed surprise when I mentioned it, and that felt really bad too. That thing you see in pop culture - and real life as you described about the wedding buffet - where pregnant women are given seats on the subway or whatever never happened for me. All I felt was that there was *still* something "wrong" with my body and the expectations people had for it. The one time that I was "supposed" to be fat I....wasn't fat enough? Or something? Not fat in the right way? It sucked.

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May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Disappointing to read about the BLW accounts! I stumbled across the book in the early 2010s, and followed it because it met my lazy goals of not having to actively feed a baby while I was trying to eat and not having to acquire/make special foods or do any additional planning. The main conversations I remember were about not oversalting food (because baby kidneys?) and choking.

It's weird (but not unexpected, I guess) that it's taken this turn. I remember the philosophy primarily being "your kids should eat what you eat" and "your kids will eat better if they get to control the process." And this seems like the opposite of that.

My three kids all ate everything we ate until they were toddlers, at which point they ate nothing. Now they're all over the place (e.g., the kid who will eat sushi but not chicken; the kid who thinks roasted broccoli is a treat but hates all other vegetables), like pretty much every other kid.

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May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

“What has changed is parents’ expectations about how kids should eat, and the pressure we feel to perform our parenting through our children’s eating habits.” This is it. I’ve been thinking about this shift... I think my parents would have considered it a win if I tried one vegetable in a week. My mom packed bag lunches of a basic sandwich (like PB&J), chips, cookie, and a fruit. My “picky” sister lived on mac & cheese, cereal, and yogurt, and it just wasn’t a big deal. And I didn’t feel like we were way outside the norm. When I did BLW with my babe, I remember my mom commenting on the “fancy” snack I was preparing (bell peppers & hummus) and saying, “I just gave you Teddy Grahams.” So while the grandparents are definitely not okay in terms of diet culture and body image, I want to give them (the ones in my life, at least) credit for their way more relaxed attitude toward feeding us as children--and their grandchildren now, too. As much as I want to roll my eyes at their comments about sugar, for instance, they don’t try to get my kid to eat a perfectly “balanced” meal or adventurous foods or whatever.

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May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

I LOVE that tweet/IG post you put in the middle and just added it to my stories with the caveat that this also applies to my pregnant body. When I tell people I am 18 weeks etc, I get a lot of, "well you don't look it!" and I understand they mean it as a compliment I guess but it still stops me dead in my tracks because I certainly FEEL it and also, were we even talking about my body, or were we talking about me being pregnant? It's like all of a sudden, when someone thinks your uterus is full, they have license to discuss how you look and it's just not ok! I told a colleague that I was pregnant and he immediately responded, "I thought you were looking fat around there," completely dead panned and serious. I was too shocked to say anything but in hindsight should have said something along the lines of, "Well I am fatter I think lately, but I am also carrying a baby now too."

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May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

...does BLW even make sense with how infants eat? I thought the typical pattern was that stationery babies will eat just about anything (within reason), but that most babies become extremely picky around the time they really master walking (for reasons that make sense from an evolutionary perspective: a stationery baby is being brought food and can presumably trust its caregiver, but an ambulatory baby is more independent and potentially eating things it finds itself. Most poisonous things have a strong taste and almost none taste sugary, hence baby's preferences for bland or sugary foods). They then expand their repertoire with repeated exposure to foods, which teaches them what foods their "tribe" has determined are safe. I would think the "combating pickiness" would have to come at the walking stage. My parents, at least, always groused about how I used to be such a good eater as a baby and then abruptly began refusing almost all foods around eighteen months.

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May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Re Q1, my kid really likes seafood and people are always like "oh, such sophisticated taste," and it's like, no, he just likes seafood. Salmon and clam chowder are just, on his own, two of his favorite foods (and honestly is clam chowder really sophisticated? it's basically a bowl of cream), it's not that he's some magic kid who'll eat anything. Show him a leafy green that is not in chicken saag from one specific Indian restaurant and you'll learn that real fast.

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May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Thank you for writing this about BLW! It CAN be a helpful tool when introducing your infant to solids, but so many people have taken it to an extreme and created way too many "rules" about how to do it perfectly -- just like dieting in adulthood.

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A few months ago, a creep at work commented on my “pregnant” belly and was incredulous like awful Norm when I said I wasn’t pregnant but was in fact recovering from recurrent miscarriages and disordered eating. It reminded me that when I WAS pregnant, same creep was asking me if I was going to have the baby “normally “ aka through my vagina or not. I was too exhausted and frustrated at the time to say anything but after the more recent comment, I filed a harassment complaint and my company took some action. My interactions with him are no longer a part of my job. The whole time he was confused about why I was mad. People can be so awful

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May 26, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

This: "(I, for one, ate almost nothing but spaghetti, white bread, and strawberry yogurt until I was 12.) What has changed is parents’ expectations about how kids should eat, and the pressure we feel to perform our parenting through our children’s eating habits. "

I do not focus on what my kid eats, and he eats a specific list of foods at home, and apparently an unending list of foods at daycare. I also was a kid who ate mostly bland foods for the majority of my childhood - and now I eat more and I'm fine (although fat, focused on salt, etc.). Is this okay to just not engage with??? Do I need to be pushing variety, veggies, different tastes? Or is this, like potty-training and much else, something that my kid will figure out if given latitude and non-judgement? What is the ruling on this from a Burnt Toast perspective?

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May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Loved reading about your responses to the annoying pregnancy predicters. I'm a teacher and believe me i LOVE middle schoolers but I once had a student who decided to meanly spread a rumor that i was pregnant to the whole grade?? that was a mind fuck.

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Everything you post is something that resonates with me! Ok. BLW. I had to do this with my first child, I didn't even know what it was or that it had a name, I just had no choice. She would not let pureed food pass her lips. Or anything on a spoon. Or sucked out of a pouch. Not a drop. So I guess she was picky before she even started weaning? Desperately, I let her start eating small things, or she'd grab things off my plate and start putting them in her mouth -- and that was it! I learned later there was a term for it, but for me it was just the only way I managed to introduce solids to her. She seemed happy and it was really fun for me, also less stressful going out to eat as there was always something she could eat. She turned out a few years later to become a really anxious, really really picky eater (you could count what she would eat on your hands) and I suspect she's a super taster and was just very sensitive to texture too. But she was already so choosy to begin with. Now, however (9 years later) she's completely coming out of her shell and is trying foods on her own, asking for things, stealing things off my plate again! It's a joy. I knew this would happen and it would all turn around, I was just willing to wait another decade or more for it. What I don't understand is why this pressure exists. What do people worry will happen if their kids are picky? If they eat the same 3 or 5 meals every day of the week? What will go wrong if that happens? If they stay in their comfort zone? Some of the closest adults around me (my brother, my husband) grew up as worse picky eaters (lasted until 18 for both) and are now the biggest foodies I know - good cooks, passionate about food and flavours, will eat anything.

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Thanks so much for this! I was actually really gung ho to do BLW with my toddler when she was a baby and made little lists of all the foods that would be fun to cook for her (I really do like cooking so it was genuinely kind of exciting). And then it turned out she hated anything that wasn't a pureed texture for months. Which . . . was fine. And now at 2.5, she is no more picky than any other 2.5-year-old. But this puts my finger on something that drove me NUTS about all the BLW rhetoric, which is that everyone always says "oh, it's so much easier because you just feed the baby what you're eating instead of making special food," but then it turns out that means mom has to make 3 homecooked meals a day with no salt and using only whole, unprocessed ingredients that introduce your child to the right new foods at the right time. As if I had the bandwidth for that with a 6-month-old instead of feeding her some mashed avocado and then popping some popcorn for me after she went to bed.

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"The perfect response to someone else's shitty assumption is whatever YOU need it to be." I love that so much, and I love that it releases me from having to craft the perfect response whilst experiencing a microaggression. As someone both fat and infertile, it is always very hard to have to respond to this question, which I also get often, despite the fact that I don't think I carry my weight in a way that makes me look pregnant at all. Sometimes, depending on the person, I like to turn the discomfort on them and say, "I wish! I can't get pregnant." and just stare at them as they squirm. But I confess I don't usually have the chutzpah for that response. I typically reply just as you do, and say, "Nope, just fat!"

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By the time I had my third kid, BLW meant letting him grab soggy McDonald's french fries from his sister's Happy Meal.

I have a mom acquaintance in a larger body and for weeks after meeting her I fretted over whether she was pregnant because I felt like a dick every time I saw her and didn't say "congratulations". I finally asked a mutual friend and she said no and then I felt like a dick all over again. When I was pregnant i remember feeling weird when people asked me about it and also weird if they said nothing.

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I love the discussion about BLW! As with most things with my daughter, I found that "all or nothing" thinking was harmful (I was told I should "exclusively breastfeed" but combo feeding with formula saved my mental health, I was told "no purees" by BLW purists, but a combo of table foods and purees was a great transition to solids for us!). So happy to have this community. <3

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