When Diet Culture Comes to Soccer Practice
5 questions for your kids' extracurricular programs. Plus: The paradox of body positivity in an anti-fat world.
Two quick reporting call-outs:
We’re going to talk about diet culture and anti-fatness in youth sports and other extracurricular activities today (there’s also a whole chapter on this in Fat Talk) but there is a more specific conversation I’ve been wanting to have for awhile about diet culture in youth theater. If you’re currently parenting a kid in a bigger body who is encountering anti-fatness in their theater program (costume sizing, fat jokes in scripts, typecasting, etc), I’d love to hear from you: What kind of bias have you encountered? How is your kid navigating it? What advice do you or your kid have for other families dealing with this?
I’m also reporting a piece on how food sensitivity tests are marketed to kids. If you’ve fallen down one of these rabbit holes with your kiddos, I’d love to hear your story: Which test brand did you use? What kind of results did you get and how did it impact your child’s relationship with food and overall health?
You and your kids can always remain anonymous for these. Leave your story in the comments or email me (virginiasolesmith @ gmail.com) and put “Theater Kids” or “Food Tests” in the subject line. You can also record and send a voice memo — still debating if these will be essays or podcast eps, or hey maybe both.
The Anti-Fatness of Body Positivity
Based on my DMs and mentions, Fat Talk has made it to Australia! (This is the UK edition, which is also available in New Zealand, South Africa and the rest of the Commonwealth.) To celebrate, I wrote about the paradox of body positivity in an anti-fat world for Instyle Australia, and even while I was working on this piece, I kept thinking: I want to have this conversation with Burnt Toast.
So here is the piece. It invokes the conversations we’ve had here with Jessica Wilson and Aubrey Gordon (if you missed those, definitely listen!). But here’s what I’m really interested in: How do we move conversations about fat liberation and body autonomy past body positivity? It makes sense so many of us start there, but on Instagram, especially, the conversation freezes there. And that personal work matters, but anti-fatness is not about your body emotions—especially when we only talk about some people’s body emotions:
Search “body positivity” on Instagram and TikTok, and the first thing you’ll notice are the torsos. They don’t all belong to super skinny models. There are some stomach rolls, and cute little belly pooches, and there are definitely boobs and butts. But these torsos do belong, almost exclusively, to thin, white women who are beautiful, or at least pretty, in just about every conventional definition of those terms. They have blow-outs. They have tans. They aren’t “perfect”, but they are very close. And they are wearing the bikini, dammit, even if that means we can see a few feather-y stretch marks or a tiny bit of cellulite. The soundtracks and captions that accompany these images are empowering: “Start telling yourself how beautiful you are!” “Love yourself first!” “Confidence is all you need!”
Here’s the thing. If you are not a thin, white woman to start with, confidence may not be “all you need” to wear a bikini, or really just to exist, in your body, in public. Confidence may not even be what’s missing.
Read the whole piece here, and then come back so we can discuss.
5 Questions To Ask: Diet Culture in After School Activities
Every August, I am slightly stunned to remember that a whole bunch of the country heads back to school before Labor Day (New York is maybe some kind of outlier? We still have almost a full month of summer break left?). Smart bloggers like Amy get their back to school content up and running by August 1, but I’m not that kind of organized. So do know that a BT Guide to diet culture and schools is coming next month, plus we’ll probably revisit school lunch as usual, and have other school-focused pieces then.
But in the meantime, I know a bunch of you are already signing up for travel soccer and dance teams and all the fall extracurricular activities. And yes, diet culture and anti-fatness shows up in all of these places. Which can be so unsettling because these are supposed to be our kids’ safe spaces, where they can explore their passions, build new skills and just be in their bodies. But just up and quitting usually doesn’t feel like the answer, especially if your kid is already in love with the activity in question. (If they aren’t in love with it and you’re encountering anti-fat bias or otherwise feeling like their body may not be safe or respected there, well, I’m here to endorse your mid-season quit!)
So it can be worth doing a little homework upfront, before the busyness of fall fully descends, to vet any new programs you’re considering, or more directly put these issues on the table with coaches and teachers you’ve worked with before. Here are three questions to ask the folks running a team, dance class or other program—and two questions to ask your kid before they start.