“Virginia Sole-Smith is a first rate reporter and a warm, compassionate, funny writer to boot.”
— Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation and author of Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights
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— Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation and author of Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights
As a journalist, Virginia Sole-Smith has reported from kitchen tables and grocery stores, 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, investigates how the “war on childhood obesity” has caused kids of all ages to absorb a daily onslaught of body shame from peers, school, diet culture, and parents themselves — and offers research-based strategies to help parents name and navigate the anti-fat bias that infiltrates our schools, doctor’s offices and family 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. Motherhood inspired a reckoning of harm caused, and 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, and our own innate understanding of how to eat, in a culture that’s constantly giving us so many mixed messages about both those things.
Virginia is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Her work also appears in the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and many other publications. She writes the newsletter Burnt Toast, where she explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health, and also hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. Virginia lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband, two daughters, a cat, a dog, and way too many houseplants.
Virginia can speak to your school, university, conference, eating disorder center, corporation, or community group about parenting—and just living— in the age of diet culture. Her presentation combines personal narrative and research to offer concrete strategies for reevaluating your relationship with diet culture, and naming and navigating anti-fat bias in our own lives.
Burnt Toast is an anti-diet, fat positive community about body liberation. It’s also a newsletter and a podcast, and the best way to keep up with Virginia’s work.
Subscribe to the Burnt Toast Newsletter and you can always listen to the podcast right in your email or in the Substack app, where you’ll also find full transcripts (lightly edited and condensed for clarity). But you can also subscribe directly to Burnt Toast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts.
Sign up for my newsletter if you like rants on the diet industry, sometimes more random musings, and answers to your questions about how to parent without passing on your own toxic body image crap.
