Virginia
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.
Corinne
And I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.
Virginia
It is time for your March Ask Us Anything episode! I feel like we should call these mailbag episodes? Ask Us Anything is so clunky. We should workshop that. If someone has a better name, let us now. But! It is time for us to answer your questions. We have a very good mix of questions. We’re going to do some parenting questions, some clothing questions, and then the miscellaneous smorgasbord kind of questions.
Corinne
The miscellaneous ones are always my favorite.
Virginia
Agreed.
Corinne
And this is also a paywalled episode! That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It’s just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Click here to join us!
Virginia
Corinne, what is new with you? It’s very windy at your house today, right?
Corinne
Yes. Spring into Mexico means horrible wind. We’re having 75 mile an hour winds.
Virginia
This sounds terrifying.
Corinne
If you don’t live somewhere where wind is a thing you don’t realize how bad it is. But it’s so bad. It just makes everyone in a bad mood.
Virginia
Is it dangerous? Like, can you drive?
Corinne
They do issue like high wind warnings, but I think it’s more for huge trucks.
Virginia
Stuff blowing around.
Corinne
Yeah, your roof blowing away. My other exciting thing is that this weekend, I went on an Unlikely Hikers hike.
Virginia
Oh, so fun. And how was it?
Corinne
It was fun. It was really cool.
Virginia
That’s awesome. I have been coveting the Unlikely Hikers Merrell collab.
Corinne
Yeah, some people were wearing those and they were very cute.
Virginia
My last Body Liberation Hiking Club hike, there were two if not three people wearing the boots and I was like, “Well, this is now all I can think about.”
Corinne
Now you need them. They’re very cute.
Virginia
And I just bought new hiking boots three months ago. So I missed the window. Cor folks who don’t know what Unlikely Hikers is, can you explain what that is and where they are and stuff?
Corinne
It’s run by this person named Jenny Bruso. Jenny travels around and does hikes in different areas. They also have worked with the brand Gregory to make plus size backpacks. And yeah, the Merrell boots. There are also starting to be some Unlikely Hikers chapters, so that’s cool. I’m hoping that maybe there will be one in Albuquerque!
Virginia
You can also start a Body Liberation Hiking Club. Because Alexa—Hi, Alexa!—launched that here in the Hudson Valley. And now we have chapters popping up all around, so we’ll link to that Instagram if people want to look for one. And I think they’re very in sync with Unlikely Hikers. I don’t think it’s like a Jets and Sharks rivalry situation or anything.
Corinne
Yeah, I’m sure it’s not.
Virginia
We are all for more people hiking in awesome ways.
Corinne
What’s new with you?
Virginia
What’s new with me is I have a child home sick. So, there’s nothing new with me. There is always a child home sick this time of year. So we may get some interruptions in this podcast recording, we’ll see. We’ve deployed her third parent the iPad to take care of things.
Corinne
Honestly, it would make me feel better if a child interrupted rather than my dog.
Virginia
You may just hear some faint coughing. I promise, she sounds like a Victorian waif but she’s totally fine. It’s just a cold. So, we’re going to start with parenting questions!
Corinne
Q: Anti-diet puberty books! At the recommendation of our doctor and the internet, we purchased the book The Care and Keeping of You Volume One for our eight year old girl. What a load of shit! So much diet talk/am I too big questions? How is this five stars on Amazon? Why are we telling children to talk to their doctors if they need to diet, to track the food they eat? I returned it. No need to have that book at our house when they are already given similar messaging out in the world. What puberty/sex ed for preteen book recommendations do you have?
Virginia
So, this is a spoiler for chapter 12 of my book, which is all about how anti-fat bias manifests in conversations around puberty. So get excited for that! Quick preorder shameless plug, make sure you’ve got Fat Talk coming! (Here’s how to get a signed copy, here’s the UK edition, and here’s the audiobook.)
But obviously, Fat Talk is not a book you will hand to your child. I do not explain puberty in any detail, but I talk about the messaging and I have a little bit on The Care and Keeping of You because that book is a wild ride. It has gone through many editions and I will say the newer editions are better. You may have purchased an older edition, but there are definitely still diet culture vibes throughout. The books that you need instead—and I’m pulling from the resource section of Fat Talk, so this will all be listed there, too:
Sonya Renee Taylor, of course: Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!): The Ultimate Puberty Book for Girls. Now, there is one footnote to this. Sonya Renee Taylor is amazing. We have discussed our love for her. I have no criticisms of her. But the first edition of this book did have some food stuff in the nutrition section that folks objected to. I’ve had my nine year old read the book and I was like, “let me know if you have questions about the food stuff.” It just gets a little good food, bad food, but overall the book is phenomenal. I mean, not surprisingly, it’s very grounded in the The Body Is Not an Apology ethos. So that is a really fantastic one and the one we have in my house.
A Body Image Workbook for Every Body: A Guide for Deconstructing Diet Culture and Learning How to Respect, Nourish, and Care for Your Whole Self by Rachel Sellers and Mimi Cole is a nice one (though weirdly only available on Amazon).
More specific to foodstuff, which I know you’re asking for like puberty, sex ed, but I think it kind of relates, The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens: A Non-Diet, Body Positive Approach to Building a Healthy Relationship with Food by Elyse Resch is very good.
For younger 8-9 year olds, Love Your Body: Your Body Can Do Amazing Things... by Jessica Sanders and Carol Rossetti is a big picture book with amazing body diverse illustrations and lots of really great messaging about how your body will be changing and how to celebrate the changes and all of that. That one’s really good.
Last one, for more of a take on body image and food issues is No Weigh!: A Teen's Guide to Positive Body Image, Food, and Emotional Wisdom.
Did you ever read The Care and Keeping of You? Was that a puberty book you encountered?
Corinne
No, I’ve never read it or heard of it. The book that my mom gave me was called It’s Perfectly Normal. Have you seen that?
Virginia
Oh, yeah. We have that one, too.
Corinne
I haven’t revisited it but I thought it was pretty good. It’s from the nineties, but…
Virginia
It’s been updated, as well. We have that one. One critique of that one is it’s very gender normative.
Corinne
That makes sense.
Virginia
I think a lot of puberty books are pretty gender binary.
Corinne
It does have a lot of like other diversity, though. I remember there being fat people and people in wheelchairs.
Virginia
Yes, it is good on that. I mean, in general, I feel like puberty books are often very good on racial diversity, disability diversity, and less good on gender and body size diversity.
Corinne
That makes sense.
Virginia
There’s room in this market is what I’m saying.
Corinne
Yeah. I wonder if there are books out there that address the gender stuff, specifically.
Virginia
Sex is a Funny Word by Corey Silverberg is a really great one for introducing a lot of the sex ed topics. It talks about masturbation in a really positive way and it definitely talks about sex and gender and gender identity. All of that stuff is really well done.
What’s tricky about this topic is that people will say puberty books and it’s like, do you just want something to explain how you get your period, or…? It’s a huge topic. So the other thing I would say is don’t expect any one book to answer everything. Expect to have to keep diving into it. But that gives you a few to to get into and yeah, The Care and Keeping of You. I think we can retire that one. That would be my vote.
Corinne
Alright, I’m going to read the next question.
My daughter is 13 and until she was 10, I was fully immersed in diet culture. I’ve since done a 180 and I’m trying so hard to not regulate what my kids eat, and just offer them options and let them choose. I try to have things I know they like available and I try to talk about food neutrally. Often though, it seems like my daughter is eating to the point of a stomachache several times a week, at least. I wonder if part of that is she often takes very big bites and doesn’t chew them much. Is she getting overly hungry? Does she need a reminder to take smaller bites? These are things I want to bring up with her. There could be something else going on, of course, and there’s so many factors that go into a stomachache, but I don’t know how to have a conversation about it or if I even should, without potentially shaming her or questioning her autonomy. I have been sort of hoping it would just work itself out? Like maybe she would start recognizing it and adjust something. But it seems like feeling sick so often isn’t great. How would you approach this?
