S2 Ep16: Virginia Sole-Smith: Anti-Fatness as a Tool of Oppression

The devaluation of fatness in patriarchy is no accident—and it’s not about health. Patriarchy convinces every woman she’s fat, or at risk of becoming fat, and forces us to spend our lives thinking about our bodies instead of the things that truly matter most to us. As we’ve seen over and over again, a woman who hates herself is more vulnerable to abuse and less likely to abandon shame, band together with other women, and demand better.

But we can and must demand better. Virginia Sole-Smith is on a mission to end anti-fatness and diet culture for good. She came on the show to talk to me about fatphobia, diet culture, and strategies for raising kids who are not so preoccupied by their bodies and food.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• What diet culture is, and how it extends well beyond diets.
  
  
• Why diet talk isn’t really about health, and how best to respond to concern-trolling about weight.
  
  
• Giving yourself permission to not forever live on a hamster wheel of weight loss.
  
  
• Healthy strategies for talking to kids about bodies, beauty, and weight.
  
  
• How to talk to kids about gendered beauty labor.
  
  
• Managing negative food and body messages from friends, school, and daycare—plus, when to opt out of diet and body-related assignments.
  
  
• Is perimenopause content diet content?
  
  
• The problem with Dr. Becky, and with parenting advice generally.
  
  
• How we can feel hopeful in a political climate that seeks to demoralize us.
  
  

About Virginia Sole-Smith

As a journalist, Virginia Sole-Smith has reported from kitchen tables, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid’s tail. Virginia’s latest book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, is a New York Times bestseller that investigates how the “war on childhood obesity” has caused kids to absorb a daily onslaught of body shame from peers, school, diet culture, and families— and offers research-based strategies to help parents name and navigate the anti-fat bias that infiltrates our schools, doctor’s offices and dinner tables.

Virginia began her career in women’s magazines, alternatively challenging beauty standards and gender norms, and upholding diet culture through her health, nutrition and fitness reporting. This work led to her first book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America, in which Virginia explored how we can reconnect to our bodies in a culture that’s constantly giving us so many mixed messages about both those things.

Virginia’s work appears in the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and many other publications. She now writes the popular body liberation newsletter Burnt Toast and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. Virginia lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her two kids, two cats, a dog, two geckos, eight chickens, and way too many houseplants.

You can find all of Virginia’s books, all books we talk about on the podcast, and a ton of book recommendations at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.