Welcome To The Indulgence Gospel

There are over 30,000 of you now!

Well, it’s Friday (of the best/most intense week of my professional life?) and regular readers know that usually that means we kick back with a Friday Thread. Sometimes we process a recent blow to fat rights. We might dissect size inclusive fashion. Or just have a cozy chat about what we’re reading. The discussions are always smart and compulsively readable, and one of my very favorite things about the Burnt Toast community.

I’m doing something a little different today though, because we reached a cool milestone on Wednesday: There are now over 30,000 of you reading Burnt Toast! And a lot of you just got here because of the book and its associated press, so I thought it might be more helpful to take a minute and catch you up on what we do here.

Burnt Toast is an anti-diet, fat positive community about body liberation. It’s also a newsletter and a podcast about how we navigate diet culture and fatphobia, especially through parenting. (But non-parents like it too!)

Burnt Toast is made with you in mind if you’re fat, if you are trying to access non-stigmatizing medical care and clothing, if you are recovering from an eating disorder in any size body, if you are trying to parent your kids differently around food and weight than what you grew up with, if you are trying to re-parent yourself on that stuff, if you have thin privilege and want to understand what that means and how to be a good ally, if you just want to burn diet culture and anti-fat bias to the goddamn ground. 

Burnt Toast is a place where we lead with science, but we also interrogate the anti-fat bias that is rampant in science, especially in the fields of nutrition, public health, and ob*sity research. We believe health doesn’t have a size, but more crucially that health is a right, not a privilege. We also know that in our world right now, “healthy” is very much a matter of resources—not will-power or intelligence. 

Burnt Toast is not a place where we apologize for eating the cupcakes or the cheese plate. It is not a place where we blame or denigrate bodies—our bodies, our kids’ bodies, celebrity bodies, any bodies. We don’t have to earn our food with exercise, we don’t have to perform health, we don’t have to get on the scale. We are open to naming and reckoning with our own biases, because we recognize that fatphobia is the air we breathe and we all have more to unlearn and more work to do.  

Burnt Toast is a safe space. I talked about this on NPR’s Fresh Air this week because the wonderful Tonya Mosley asked what kind of pushback my work gets and how I manage that—and being in community with all of you is how. In a surprise to exactly no one, that interview (specifically the part where I talk about the intersections of white supremacy and anti-fatness) triggered pieces on Fox News, the New York Post and other conservative outlets and I’ve received an avalanche of hate mail in the past 72 hours. They’re in my DMs on every platform, and my email. Yesterday morning I deleted my public Facebook page without a second thought, because the trolls took over the comments. But I don’t need or want it back because we’ve got this and it’s so much better.

The need to keep Burnt Toast safe is why commenting privileges are for paid subscribers only. If you’d like to join us and a paid subscription is out of reach, feel free to hit reply and ask for a comp. I give them out no questions asked. But if you are able, supporting this work financially helps ensure that we stay an ad, sponsor, and troll-free space. And while the majority of what I write and produce here is free, you also get full access to the Burnt Toast archives, to all paywalled podcast episodes, and my monthly Ask Virginia columns.

By the way, a safe space should not be an echo chamber. I encourage good faith questions and constructive criticism and love how often you hold me accountable and make me a better writer and thinker. Also, even trolls can occasionally create beauty. Behold, my favorite comment of this whole weird week:

@v_solesmithThat last line on my tombstone, please.

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Yes, I texted Corinne furious that we didn’t name this newsletter Indulgence Gospel. But maybe t-shirts???

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Previously On Burnt Toast

Here are some of my most popular pieces, which may answer some of your most immediate questions about diet culture and anti-fatness. You can always email me if you have others you want considered for Ask Virginia or our monthly mailbag episodes.

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Book Update!

I wrote a little mid-pub-week update for the Team FAT TALK folks yesterday and you can catch up here. But the TL/DR is that Amazon reviews are super important for the success of a book. FAT TALK is ranking well right now, but see above about trolls — they come for the Amazon reviews too. So I would love, love, love Burnt Toast to get in there and post some positive reviews, to help keep things tilted in the right direction. Even if you didn’t buy the book on Amazon, you can leave a review for it. Obviously 5 stars are preferred. You don’t have to write a ton (but you can! You can also include photos!).

You can also review the book anywhere else you’ve bought it, and I especially love you if you bought it from an independent bookstore! If you haven’t bought it yet, don’t forget that Split Rock Books is the official signed copies headquarters, and that you can take 10 percent off any title in the Burnt Toast Bookshop with the purchase of FAT TALK (or if you’ve previously purchased FAT TALK from them).

AND - if you order anything from Split Rock tomorrow (Saturday, 4/29), you’ll be entered to win a free copy of FAT TALK! They have 6 to give away. I signed them all and so did my 5-year-old Beatrix. Collector’s editions!

Speaking of Love Notes

I have a giant stack of FAT TALK post cards that I would LOVE to send out to all of you. We wrote a bunch as a family last weekend and it was so much fun and really helped Beatrix, especially, grasp what the book is about in a way that me just talking hasn’t. If you aren’t sure what you’d do with them, this reel has a few ideas.

You can write them or draw on them with your kids, you can mail them to someone who would love one, you can use them as private journal prompts… or you can post what you write on social media with #fattalklovenotes, which yes, helps spread the word about the book but is also just fun and puts a ton of fat positive energy into the world. Trust me, we need that right now.

I’d love to mail you the cards as a thank you for preordering/reviewing/generally being awesome. Just drop your address here. (I’ll send these out this weekend!)

And ICYMI

There’s a great excerpt from Chapter 11 (on anti-fatness in youth sports!) on Literary Hub.

Romper excerpted Chapter 8 on moms trying to raise “normal” eaters after a lifetime of diet culture.

Anne Helen Peterseninterviewed me for Culture Study.

Melinda Wenner Moyerinterviewed me for Is My Kid The Asshole?

And I’m also on The Messy Intersection, Dr. Becky Good Inside, and Forever35.

The UK’s iNews reviewed the book here.

Charlotte Markey wrote about the book for Psychology Today.

BookRiot and The Unpublishable both included FAT TALK on their awesome book round-ups.

Have a great weekend, friends! I’ll be in my garden as much as the weather allows, far, far away from DMs. xx