Hello, you Cindy and Balls of Stardust.
Welcome to Struggle Care.
I'm your host, Casey Davis.
I'm here with Virginia Sol Smith, and she is an author.
She's written a book called Fat Talk, and I got an advanced edition, and I'm so excited
to have her here on the show today.
Hi, Virginia.
Hi, thanks for having me.
I loved your book, okay?
So let me, I'll just read back so that people kind of get caught up, okay?
It says, by the time they reach kindergarten, most kids believe that fat is bad.
Kids learn as we have all learned to pursue thinness and survive in a world, to survive
thinness in a world that equates our body size with our value, and there's more here.
And so in the subtitle is Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, which is amazing.
So I had to tell you that this book was so much more than I expected because I am someone
who I've been on my own journey with diet culture and my relationship with food and
all these things.
And I do a lot consciously to help cultivate a healthy relationship with my children to
food.
And main ways that I'm doing that now is like making sure I don't comment on their bodies
and implementing like a different way of approaching food.
Like we don't do clean your plate.
We don't do eat your broccoli before your dessert.
And you talk about both of those things in your book as like things that we, maybe our
parents did that aren't helpful in you tell stories and you give data to back that up.
But what's so interesting to me was like, that is like the whole of the advice and like
the general conversation when you're reading blogs and listening to podcasts.
Like that's kind of where it stops when it comes to like thinking critically about how
we were brought up around food.
And I'm curious, like your book goes into so much more and we'll go into that.
But I'm just curious if you have thoughts about like, why do they tend to stop there?
You're totally right.
It does stop there.
I think it's because those feel like two very actionable things that people can kind
of wrap their brains around.
But even more, I think it's because just making a simple rule of, okay, I won't make
them finish broccoli in order to have dessert.
I can see the research that supports that.
That's very cut and dried.
That is great.
It's important.
I really do recommend people do it.
But it doesn't ask you to reckon with your own anti-fat bias.
It doesn't ask you to go deeper and think, why am I pushing the broccoli so hard?
Why does the broccoli matter so much?
Why is the dessert so scary?
Like what is this actually about?
And once you strip away what it's actually about, it's about the fear that if you are
a parent in a larger body, if you have a kid in a larger body, that society will treat
you differently and worse than if you are thin.
And that having a kid in a larger body especially is going to reflect back on you as the parent
as some kind of failure.
And so dealing with that and pulling up all that bias, like, oh, super uncomfortable,
super hard to look at, super difficult work, a lot of them learning.
Like, yeah, I get why a lot of the blogs and the kid food Instagram keeps it to like,
oh, don't make them finish the broccoli.
Yeah.
And I also wonder if a part of it is like every time I've read about not restricting
dessert, it's always about how because when you restrict dessert, dessert becomes taboo,
and then it becomes wanted.
And then that's what we crave and we can't have moderation.
And we talk a lot about how that can start binge eating or that can start quote unquote
overeating.
And a part of me wonders if like in our effort to like give our kids a better relationship,
part of why that's like the advice is because we're hoping like, well, then maybe this will
work for them to not eat too many Oreos.
Oh, I think that's a big part of it.
I mean, very often the way that advice is framed and I have been guilty of this.
I have to be clear in my own content at times is people will kind of hold up like the bag
of Halloween candy a week later that's still like overflowing with candy or, you know,
the box of donuts that came in the house and your kid actually only one of them or whatever.
And they'll be like, see, this is why getting, easing up restriction is so great because
look, my kids can take or leave sugar.
And then where does that leave the parent of the kid who actually is always going to
want three donuts and always is going to be the kid who eats their Halloween candy all
in one sitting.
And that's just how they're wired and we don't actually need to demonize that either.
And so it's really important to understand that like actually the goal for this kind
of advice is not to have a kid who has like no emotions in the face of sugar and never
craves a cupcake and can like totally take it or leave it.
The goal is just to have a kid who does not feel anxious and fraught about their love
of these foods that they can just enjoy them.
Like, yay, it's cupcake time.
I'm having one cupcake or four cupcakes, whatever I'm actually feeling in the moment.
And then I can move on with my day and nobody made me feel like shit about it.
And I don't have to feel a whole bunch of complicated feelings about the cupcakes.
I can just like have that joy in the cupcake and whatever that looks like for me, which
is in a very for all of us on any given day.
And you do a good job in the beginning of your book of laying out that for all of the
concern we have about our children's physical health, that like fat phobia kind of gets
mingled with that, you know, there is a real damaging effect to their mental and emotional
and physical health through things like restricting, putting kids on diets, making these kind
of body comments to our kids.
Because it's not just like, oh, let's do it this way because I'm being virtuous.
It's like, oh, no, like if we really cared about our kids' health, like we wouldn't be
doing these things.
Yeah, no, that's completely it.
We know that the number one risk factor for eating disorders is weight-based shaming and
dieting in childhood.
And a lot of the way we're taught to engage with kids around food and bodies is both
of those things at once.
So we really need to reckon with like if health is truly your priority and so often health
is sort of a dog whistle.
It's kind of a coded word for like actually I just prefer it than this.
But if you're like, no, no, no, it really is about health, then you have to think about
health as much more than just a number on a scale or a point on the growth chart.
You have to think about health as mental well-being, emotional health, felt safety, all these
other things that really matter and really impact this and that impact the physical health
outcomes as well.
So it's a much more comprehensive way of thinking about kids and health and food.
And it's just removing so much shame.
It's removing so much pressure.
And when you step out of it, it's sort of wild to think that people think that the other
way is going to be health promoting, like how would making someone feel like they can't
trust their body and can't trust themselves around food and that their body is a problem
to solve.
Like how would that promote health?
And yet that is like so many of our systems and larger culture builds on that model.
I want to read this little excerpt here.
It's in the very beginning, in introduction, you say unlearning this core belief about
the importance of thinness means deciding that thin bodies and fat bodies have equal
value.
To do this, you have to know that humans have always come in a variety of sizes, that
body diversity is both beautiful and necessary.
You have to believe that being fat isn't a bad thing.
And that means you have to challenge a lot of what you think you knew about health, beauty,
and morality.
That was such a beautiful passage because you do this thing in the book where you say like,
hey, this is like the part of this that's just like right in a moral sense, like bringing
more justice into the world.
And then you also speak to us as parents when it comes to like, hey, this is like how
to actually promote health with our children.
But you also like you don't stop there.
You actually go and you have data and you have the research and you dissect why it is that
we think that fat must equal unhealthy and skinny must equal healthy.
And you give really good data for that.
And I think that's really cool.
And then in that, I mean, I'm going to flip pages.
You're going to hear it the whole time.
Here's what I thought was so amazing about this book.
Like I wrote some notes.
I'm all over the place today, but my listeners are used to it.
Okay.
I love the flipping.
Okay.
So I feel like so for listeners who have never maybe seen me, I am five two.
I'm currently like maybe a hundred and sixty pounds over the past two years, I have been
in the hundred and sixty to hundred and eighty pound range.
And as someone who's five two, like, you know, I'm in this weird spot.
Okay.
And I don't consider myself someone who is skinny and I don't consider myself someone
who is fat with a capital F.
And what I mean by that is I don't experience the discrimination and the bias in the medical
field in the social arena.
I don't get harassed on airplanes.
Like I don't experience the kind of discrimination that fat people experience that are in larger
bodies than mine.
And what I loved about this book was there were several points that I read where I really
realized, oh my God, you have pinpointed how anti-fat.
The bias in our culture has harmed me, has hurt me as a child and has created all sorts
of issues in my own relationship to food and my own health and my own sort of relationships
there.
And one thing that you talk about a couple of times that I've never seen anyone talk
about before and I'm sure they do and I just have never been exposed to it.
But you specifically talked about weight distribution.
Yeah.
So that's the concept of Aaron Harrop, I think, is the source in the book who elucidated
that really well for me.
And they talk about how depending how your weight is distributed, you may have more or
less thin privilege than someone of an equal body size than you.
So and I hate this terminology.
It comes from Women's Magazines, which is also where I come from.
So I have a lot of feelings about it.
But I am someone who is in apple shape for lack of a less ridiculous term.
You know, I wear plus sizes.
I identify a small fat, which is again in reference to the fact that I don't experience
the more extreme forms of fat discrimination.
I can fit into an airplane seat, like public spaces are built for me.
I can order clothes.
I have to mostly shop online in person stores, not so much, but like I can get clothes that
fit my body.
I definitely do experience some weight stigma, doctor's offices, like it comes up in different
ways, but I have a lot of thin privilege.
But having that apple shape body means that someone else who's my same weight with the
powerglass figure is going to have a different set of privileges and ability to access clothes,
because their body is much closer to the thin ideal or the sort of larger beauty ideals
we have, which is that like, you know, you can have curves if they're in the quote, right
places, but not the wrong places.
So yeah, that's the weight distribution piece of it.
And it is really fascinating to sort of see it also often intersects quite a lot with
class and with race in interesting ways.
And so all of these different aspects of fatness, you know, become these kind of intersecting
identities with whatever other marginalization you may hold.
And yeah, you know, I mean, and then on the flip side, I'll say like, even though I'm an
apple shape, I'm also someone who like has skinny legs and like skinnier and then a
skinny face.
That's a weird term.
But like, so there's also ways that like when I post a picture on Instagram, I might
present as thinner than I present in a doctor's office.
So this is where it can get really maddening because you can feel like your body is like
this sort of moving target if you are so focused entirely on like how do other people perceive
it and how does this enable me to move through the world.
And I think what's important to take away from that is like it's of course useful to
sort of understand it for ourselves, but it is most important to understand it in the
context of the spectrum of fatness and to sort of take it in sort of analyze where it shows
up in your own life, but then think, okay, where am I benefiting and who is not benefiting
when I'm benefiting?
You know, who's being pushed out because we prize thin wrists or small, you know, like
all these other weird things that like fall into, you know, how this shows up.
And so I just think that's, yeah, it can feel like you're really down the rabbit hole,
but it's also like definitely happening all the time.
No, that's exactly my experience in reading your book was I felt like you pointed out
ways in which I had never had articulated that like I never was a kid that struggled
with weight, but I have always struggled with weight distribution.
I felt like my body wasn't the right shape.
And so pin connecting that to anti fat bias and some other things was kind of a moment
for me of going, oh, this is how anti fat bias has affected me.
But at the same time, you did a really good job of rooting me kind of understanding like
where I am on the continuum of harm in our sexing with where I am on the continuum of
privilege.
So I am sort of in that space where the primary impact of anti fat bias in our culture creates
emotional distress for me.
But with the exception of maybe like mean online comments, like, which is still emotional
distress, I don't experience barriers to parts of society.
That kind of said this early, right?
Like I've never been discriminated against for healthcare.
I have never had someone tell me that I can't write a park ride that I've never had someone
discriminate against me for a job, which we know that data shows that fat people are
discriminated against for jobs.
And so that was really helpful because it was like, okay, validating, totally cool to
recognize like where your own wounds are and important to recognize I am not the one most
harmed by this and that this is a systemic justice issue, not just a personal self esteem
issue.
Yeah.
And I think that's where a lot of the online discourse really loses the plot.
I mean, I just did a whole thing on my newsletter about the mid size queen trend on TikTok.
And it's a lot of straight size women embracing their mid size status, which is to say they
are not a size two and sort of talking about how this creates perceived barriers for them.
But we just have to step back and say like, your personal struggle is real and valid and
you're, you know, any one of us feeling like we don't feel safe in our bodies, like we
deserve that safety, we deserve to work on that and to be, you know, supported through
that.
But when we leave the conversation there with the struggle, the sort of emotional struggles
specifically of thin to small fat white women, we are really ignoring this larger constellation
of issues and who is really being harmed the most by this.
And I would also say like for me personally, and I don't know if this will resonate with
you, is really helped me let go of my own shit to understand the larger spectrum of this.
Because I don't want to be that white lady, you know, I don't want to be like pushing other
people out of the conversation and centering myself over and over.
Like I can see the harm that causes.
And so that makes it sound then feel like an act of radical self acceptance, but also
a form of social justice, a form of activism to say, I'm going to wear, you know, like
right now I'm wearing like a sports bra and my stomach is out and I am totally like fuck
that beauty standard.
And also like that's great for me personally, but that's also like some work I can do on
myself that's like on behalf of this larger thing.
I don't want to be a part of that system.
Well, I think it taps into like a lot of what my audience resonates with, which is like
we talk a lot about like, why do I struggle so badly to care for myself?
But then I can go do all those same tasks for someone else.
And I'm with you like all of the areas where like despite really trying to unpack fatphobia
and anti fat bias for myself and like getting to a place of acceptance for my body, like
some of that stuff just won't budge, right?
Like at the end of the day, it's like, it's just there.
However, when I think about what me existing in the world without trying to change myself,
how that can push dialogue, social change, atmosphere, like how that can push it forward,
it's like it's easier to care for others more than for yourself, right?
And so I think that that was cool as a parent reading that because you're right what you
said at the beginning, which is like we have to unpack our own stuff while trying to avoid
giving it to our kids.
Oh, I know what I was going to say.
The other thing that I think is really helpful about the way you rooted us in that intersection
of privilege and discrimination or bias is that a lot of times what I've seen with that
mid-size and I guess mid-size is what I would say I am as well is that when we're not aware
of what anti fat bias really is and what it looks like and we're uprooting that, we
end up using the ways in which we try to soothe ourselves and heal ourselves and tell ourselves
we're okay, end up hurting people that are fatter than us.
Yes, yes.
We end up saying, I'm not fat, this is just how women's bodies were meant to look.
We're supposed to have fat around our belly and it's like, well, okay, but some people
are fat.
Are fat.
Yeah, you're still making fat the thing to avoid.
This comes up all the time when I hear from my readers, I'll get these furious emails from
parents because they've just been to the pediatrician and the pediatrician made a big
fuss about their child having a high percentile on the growth chart and they'll be like, it's
so discriminatory, it's so wrong, blah, blah, blah, and he's not even fat.
Meaning like this is happening to my like, stocky athletic kid or my tall daughter, you
know, who's big-boned and like, how terrible.
It's like, no, no, what's terrible about this BMI?
It's terrible about the way we, you know, medicalize way that what you just experienced is like
a tiny taste of what fat people are experiencing and that's what's terrible.
What's terrible is the way that gets weaponized against fat people and you are just saying
me that you don't want your kid to be in the fat kid club.
And so that's another way of, and that's what it really comes down to is when we stay
too focused on our own personal struggles without this larger awareness of our privilege
and the system we're operating in, we will only end up reinforcing and perpetuating the
bias more because we aren't seeing who's not there.
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Okay, so we've talked about like kind of some heady stuff and you do like again, you firmly
root us in the bigger picture, but you don't stop there.
Like it's not just this heady read like you give really practical advice.
And one of the things that I think is helpful is that you talk about how much of an impact
us talking to our children about bodies, about their bodies, about other bodies.
And there are lots of things that I think we would recognize as harmful, but I think
you do a good job of saying even like innocuous comments that you think you're making that
is no big deal like are creating these issues.
And you do a really great job of once again, making this a book that is not just for parents
of fat children.
Like you talk at length about how this paradigm harms even thin children who will always be
thin.
And I wanted to just read this little part that you have.
Okay.
And it says, when the adults in my life told me that I could eat as many treats as I wanted
as a thin kid while policing themselves, I learned that I was getting away with something.
There was a certain thrill, but it also gave those foods more power, which made me more
obsessive about wanting to eat them.
And when I did say eat an entire box of fudge and one afternoon and didn't immediately
gain weight, it reinforced my sense that thinness was some sort of innate superpower, that I
could eat whatever I wanted without gaining weight and was therefore superior to people
who couldn't.
Thinness gradually became wrapped up in my sense of self as a talented and successful
person.
It felt deeply tied to my other achievements, like getting good grades and winning my high
schools, playwriting competition three years in a row.
Even though those were goals that I had worked for and my childhood body size required no
such effort.
This made it much more difficult to come to terms with my less than and later small fat
adult body because I wasn't just buying bigger clothing sizes.
I was untangling my identity from thinness, even though the roles that make up my identity
now writer, mother, obsessive gardener should not have a body type.
That is to me was one of the more powerful things because I resonated with it.
I understood it.
And it helped me in thinking about talking to my children and getting away from this.
Well, we just don't want to hurt fat people.
It's like, no, we don't want to hurt anyone.
And everyone is really harmed by this.
So I thought that was really interesting because you also talk about how you can engage with
medical providers to protect your children from that kind of stigma, that kind of wait
talk, that kind of fat talk and how we should re-examine sports for children and how that
can be a breeding ground for this kind of messaging because it's true that there's only
so much that we can do with our children, but the world has an influence.
So we need to know how to integrate in whatever that word is.
Last point, I have heard so much advice about how to talk to my children about bodies in
a good way.
You're the first person that I've heard talk about how to teach my children how to think
critically about the way society talks about bodies.
And it just hit me like, oh, that's the much more important thing that I need to be doing
with my kids.
The story about the brothers and they were calling one of their brothers a fat idiot
and the mom says, why do you say that?
What do you notice about fat people?
What do you notice about why that's an insult?
And it was like light bulb moment.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many layers to this, but I think what often happens is
once parents start reckoning with, oh my gosh, diet culture is everywhere.
Oh my gosh, anti-fat biases everywhere.
You of course want to protect your kid, right?
And so you think like, how can I keep them in a bubble?
How can I?
And you know, I'll get emails like, I'm not going to let my three year old watch Peppa
Pig anymore because they make jokes about Daddy Pig's tummy.
And I'm like, I agree.
It's really annoying that you can't watch a cartoon with your toddler and not have anti-fat
bias show up.
Like I also cringe at the Daddy Pig scenes, but what if instead it was a chance to be like,
well, I don't think there's anything wrong with Daddy Pig's tummy.
Why is Peppa being so mean to her dad?
What do you think?
And like, just start having those conversations and like absolutely when I did it with my three
year old, it was like blank stares, what?
I don't know.
You know, like we didn't.
It's not like my child responded with a thoughtful dialogue about this.
But now that that child is almost 10, I am having her, you know, she brought me her iPad
recently.
She was playing some like Penguin Island game on her iPad.
She was like, mama, check this out.
And it was an ad that popped up in the middle of this children's video game for keto weight
loss drugs.
And she was like, what is this doing here?
And again, I had the instinct of like, oh, I want to like throw your iPad into the sea.
Like this is why video games, you know, like I had that.
I just want to protect you from it.
But I like took a deep breath and I was like, oh, what do you think of that?
What are you seeing here?
And now it's become this great thing whenever that ad pops up on her game, she brings it
over and she's like, can you believe it says expert approved?
What experts approving these drugs?
How why are they thinking kids should take this?
You know, and like it's become this opportunity to build skills.
And so, and I want to be clear, like my parenting is often incredibly flawed.
And this is like one victory I've had in the last six months that I'm really dining out
on.
I think of all the answers because I don't.
But on that front, I feel like, okay, we're building some skills and both my kids have
thin privilege right now.
They are in straight size bodies and I still know how important it is to be interrogating
this with them because they may very well take after me and not always be straight sized
or they may take after my husband and be straight sized forever.
You know, Jerry's out either way.
I don't want them to think that thinness is pivotal to their identity, that thinness
is something they have to fight to hold on to.
I want them to not live because if you think about it, like, thinness and fatness only
exist in opposition to one another.
As long as we're continuing to pit them against each other, that's where all of these issues
come from.
And so the more we can do to use fat as a positive term, you know, they're used to
me describing myself as fat.
They don't think fat is a bad word.
It's used in a totally innocuous way in our household all the time.
That's what I'm trying to work towards so that it doesn't feel like this scary thing.
And again, the rest of the world is out there.
They're going to encounter the anti-fat bias in all of the different ways they encounter
it, but they're developing the skills to question that and to reckon with it.
Another thing I'll say is like, even if you have thin kids, it's important to talk about
this stuff the same way white parents need to talk about racism, right?
We need to talk about anti-blackness because when we don't do it, we are going to raise
kids who have these, you know, the culture will fill in the gaps for you and you want
to be out there.
Yeah, they're going to get the default setting.
Right.
And we want to, we want to give some counter programming to the default settings and help
them build those skills.
So I know that if someone's listening and they're maybe hearing this for the first time
or they're, you know, they're maybe they're not as exposed to this kind of pushback on
diet culture, I'm sure that there is welling up in them that fear of what about their health?
What about their health?
I wanted us to go into that because that's, that could be a whole podcast.
There's a lot of resources.
I just wanted to bring it up to say that you do address that in the book.
Like what about their health?
Like you do a very good job of that.
Here's really the last question that I wanted to ask you.
In this conversation, I noticed that I am thinking a lot about moms and mothers, even
when you say how parents talk to their kids, in my head, it's like moms and mothers, the
conversation in the culture is dominated by I used to see my mom talk negatively about
her body or my mom used to always point out my weight.
My mom put me on a diet and there's this really huge emphasis on the impact that moms being
screwed up by diet culture screw up their kids.
And that's why I thought that it was so fascinating and amazing when I got to your chapter, chapter
nine, that's called straight white dads on diets.
So can you just talk to us for a minute about this chapter?
Why did you include this chapter and what is this chapter about?
Yeah, I included this chapter because exactly as you say, the default setting is to think
this is entirely moms and daughters a shoe.
So I also made sure throughout the book to include some stories from boys as well.
So and gender queer kids, like I tried to include a diversity of genders just throughout
the book in kind of a more natural way.
But I decided we needed a chapter on dads because I don't think we talk nearly enough
about how much damage dads can do in this conversation.
And it plays out in a couple of different ways.
And I want to be really clear, I'm not shaming any parent in this.
I mean, I also talk a lot in the book about how mothers are unfairly blamed and given all
the responsibility for our kids' bodies and like that really needs to change.
So I'm not saying like, okay, now we need to blame dads instead.
Like everyone's fault.
I'm saying I don't think our culture is giving men like, again, cis straight white men in
particular, but all men in some ways.
I don't think they're being given a script for how to talk about their bodies in a way
that would let them do this work.
And so what that plays out as is men doing things like crossfit or counting macros or
doing intermittent fasting, like there is a male diet culture, diets that are marketed
to men that is distinct from the diet culture we see marketed to women often.
And it's given a kind of gravitas that a lot of the diets marketed to women are not given
in quite the same way.
It's often like more science backed and it's people like Jack Dorsey, like he's a billionaire
tech CEO talking about intermittent fasting or it's these doctors.
It's Michael Pollan who has been given like-
It's about like optimizing yourself as a human.
Right.
And like you're doing it in this like smart, very like brainy kind of way.
But it's the same.
It's the same thing.
At the end of the day, it's rooted in anti-fat bias and all those diets do is teach restriction,
which is everything every woman learned in Weight Watchers.
It's the same goddamn thing.
And I think stripping that back is so important because when we're giving men only that language
to talk about bodies, they then can't talk about the feelings, right?
They can't, they don't have the scripts for talking about hating their bodies and how
that's making it hard to function or the distress that's causing.
They're only sort of staying in this very like, you know, practical, I have to do X,
Y, and Z to achieve this body and maintain my body way.
And we really see the fallout of that on kids because they're of course, you know, looking
up to their dad just like they look up to their mom.
They're getting this model set, this template is set.
And the other piece of it that I think is really interesting is how gendered our labor
around food is so that in most heterosexual relationships, it's often the mom who's
a running point on the feeding and the meal prep and the cooking and all of that.
And that means she's more likely to have started to do some of this work because if she's following
food influencers and you know, she's going to start reckoning with diet culture there.
And then meanwhile, the dads are less engaged, right?
They are not judged by how their kids eat in the same way.
They don't have the same pressure on them.
But it means they're not really engaging with this conversation.
So then they're showing up to the dinner table and being like, no, you do have to finish
your broccoli to have the cookie.
And not, and like expecting that to be given some weight and authority when they aren't
actually like they don't have receipts to back that up.
And I just think that's also another layer to this that we need in particular heterosexual
men to be taking a much more active role in the labor of family feeding and like management
of family bodies and all of this labor.
And we need to be working towards being able to have conversations where they can do their
own emotional work around this.
So whenever I talk about care tasks and cleaning, one of the issues that comes up is when it's
almost always women that say this will say like, I just can't sit down and relax if the
house is messy.
And there are just certain seasons of life where like you can't like if you never sit
down unless the house is perfectly clean, you'll never sit down.
And one of the things that I talk about a lot is how I believe that there are lots of
women out there with undiagnosed generalized anxiety disorders because the way in which
they are carrying out those anxiety behaviors is culturally accepted for women.
Like it's acceptable for a woman to never sit down for her always to be about cleaning
for her, you know, and sometimes it's like jokey and there's a difference between like
oh, I like to putter, I have ADHD and the joke about like mom never gets through a whole
movie.
She has to get up and fold laundry.
And because like it's socially acceptable for women to be anxious even in distress and
pain as long as the way they're carrying that out is like cleaning the home.
And I feel like this in some ways mirrors that like this is the way like men, I feel
like are massively under diagnosed when it comes to eating disorders because so many
times their disordered eating habits show up as socially acceptable gendered behavior.
Like use that like masked as this like I'm just optimizing my mind and body and I'm
counting my macros and I'm getting stronger.
I'm training for an Ironman, you know, like I'm just a triple sport athlete and that's
a normal thing for a 46 year old man to do.
Like I mean, and it's not that it's not normal, but like what about the larger like what about
the work that goes into that and the amount of mental bandwidth that takes for you to do.
And yeah, and there's an interesting intersection between those two people when they marry each
other.
Because what happens is that she becomes very angry that she's carrying the whole load
of the house and he is leaving for four hours every Saturday to go bike.
Yep.
And so it's this combination of, you know, yes, I'm overburdened as the woman, but also
some of the overburdening I'm giving myself because I can't relax unless everything's
perfect.
And then he's in this space of like, yeah, like I'm kind of avoiding, I'm going biking
and you know, and I should be here for my family, but it's like this, the idea that like I
can just leave my family to do this without, you know, a reciprocal conversation for four
hours because leaving to do this healthy thing is like the trump card.
Like who could argue with that?
I'm going to exercise when it's like, maybe there's something else more obsessive going
on.
Right.
Why are you exercising at that level?
Like what is this?
When need is this meeting?
And why does it feel similarly like, why can you not just sit down?
You know, like it's another version of that I can't sit down until the house is clean.
Like I can't, I talked to Matt and who are like one guy in the book who was like, I
can't relax, it's 9 p.m. at night and I haven't closed my ring on my Apple watch.
I'm going to go for a run.
Like that's something, that's something to look at.
But you know, that's, I mean, and he identified it as an obsession.
And I think that feels pretty right.
But yeah, because especially because it's a man doing, you know, and you think if your
teenage daughter was doing that, you might be like, Oh, I don't know if my thin teenage
daughter is going out for runs at nine or 10 o'clock at night, I'd be worried.
But I'm not worried if her dad does that.
Or like your 14 year old going to spend four hours on the treadmill.
Right.
But he's training for a marathon.
So it's fine.
Like, and I just want to be clear because probably there's a lot of like marathon people
listening who now want to like send me hate mail.
Like, I'm not saying you can't have a healthy relationship with running.
I'm saying in general in our culture, we are not interrogating these things.
And it shows up in a, you know, there's things that show up that are worth looking at.
Yeah, I think that's interesting, especially when you find yourself putting that, it's
not like, you know, biking for four hours is bad.
But if you're beginning to put it above priority over other things that maybe should be the
higher priority, that's when the conversation happens.
Okay.
So just to wrap up, the book is Fat Talk, the Fat Talk Parenting in the Age of Diet
Culture, the author is Virginia Sol Smith.
And when does the book come out?
It is out April 25th.
So anywhere you buy books, there's also the audio book version is out and the UK, Australia,
New Zealand edition will be out around the same time.
So yeah, you can get anywhere you buy books.
And you know, you can also follow me on my sub stack newsletter, burnt toast, which is
at Virginius sol Smith dot sub stack.com or subscribe to the burnt toast podcast.
And I'm on Instagram, Twitter and tick talk, although I am not as good at tick talk as
Casey.
And all of those is at V underscore sol Smith.
So coming up.
Amazing.
Thank you again.
Thank you for sending me the book.
Oh, thank you.
Go out and get this book or read it, or you know, listen to it while you're doing your
care tasks.
I feel like it is a really helpful resource for our parents.
Thank you.
That means so much.
Thank you.
Bye.
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