Welcome to Where We Let You Eat...Everything
I’ll show you around. It’s lovely here!
Hello from the depths of my Google Drive, where I’m sifting through pages of interviews and notes for two fairly complicated stories-in-progress, both of which I’m planning to publish over the next few weeks.
But first, we reached a cool milestone this week: There are now over 50,000 of you receiving this newsletter! And many of you are brand new arrivals, courtesy of this weekend’s New York Times piece on my work and enviable hair.
Whenever we have a big influx, I like to help everybody get settled and find the snacks. If you’ve been here awhile, feel free to help welcome folks in the comments, and let them know what you find fun or useful about Burnt Toast.
Burnt Toast is an anti-diet, fat positive community about body liberation.
It’s also a newsletter and a podcast —co-hosted and produced by
—about how we navigate diet culture and anti-fat bias.Burnt Toast is a safe space 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 should be a right, not a privilege. And it’s about so much more than how fast you run, or how hard you tried to stick to your last diet.
Burnt Toast is not a place where we apologize for eating 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 understand fatphobia is the air we breathe and we all have more to unlearn and more work to do.
Here’s How It Works
Burnt Toast is an ad and sponsor-free space.
We do this because you can’t do good anti-diet journalism any other way. You can read more about our advertising policy here. But the TL/DR is that we are an entirely reader-supported community. (We do use affiliate links, but only when it’s an item we’ve already bought with our own money.)
If you’re a free subscriber to Burnt Toast, you’ll get chunks of my weekly essays (and at least one monthly free piece), every guest interview on the podcast, and previews of our weekly Friday Threads.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get behind every paywall on an essay or Ask Virginia column. You’ll also get our monthly Indulgence Gospel episodes and commenting privileges, including Friday Threads.
Regular paid subscriptions are 20 percent off right now, in honor of the #UnflatteringToast Style Challenge!
(More on the style challenge here and here and click here for the discount).
If you’re an Extra Butter subscriber, you get all of the above plus another bonus podcast episode, monthly live threads, and a comp subscription to
. You can also DM with me on the Substack app!Extra Butter is also 20 percent off this week only!
If a paid subscription is out of reach for you, just email us for a comp—we give them out, no questions asked. (Alas, we can’t give comps access to Extra Butter content yet, but we’re working on this with Substack.)
Previously On Burnt Toast
Here are some of our most popular pieces and episodes, which may answer some of your most immediate questions about diet culture and anti-fatness.
Coming Up: Fat Swim Week!
A bunch of you have been asking for plus size swimsuit recs lately, so we’re working on a whole Burnt Toast Fat Swim Week for next month. Yes, this will include swimsuit recs, but we also want to talk about body hair (to remove or not remove!), fat swim experiences, general body/swim anxiety and whatever else is on your mind. If you have swimsuit recs to share or swim-related questions, please drop them here.
Yay! Love seeing you ons the NYT but clearly I have FEELINGS about the framing and the lack of nuance or focus on the incredible community you've built here. This is truly one of the most lovely places online and my world is bigger, clearer, and more interesting because of you and all of your invaluable work. HEART EMOJI and BurntToast4Life.
I loved the piece…reading the NYT and running across your article was like running into an old friend in the grocery store. “Oh! I know you!” Damn, though, the comments were a bummer. As a longtime NYT subscriber, I should have expected it. The level of priggish self-congratulation in the comments on anything health related is through the roof. Fatphobe City. Oh, well…screw ‘em. And welcome to the new subscribers!