Burnt Toast is an anti-diet, fat positive community about body liberation.

It’s also a newsletter and a podcast about how we navigate diet culture and fatphobia, especially through parenting. (But non-parents like it too!)

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 is a right, not a privilege. We also know that in our world right now, “healthy” is very much a matter of resources—not will-power or intelligence.

Burnt Toast is not a place where we apologize for eating the cupcakes or 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 recognize that fatphobia is the air we breathe and we all have more to unlearn and more work to do.

Oh and if you are a healthcare provider who prescribes intentional weight loss, have a “lifestyle plan” to promote, are anti-choice/politically conservative, or think your fat friend “has such a pretty face,” Burnt Toast is probably not the place for you.

I write Burnt Toast because we need a place to critique diet culture and combat fatphobia, without the continual compromise required by advertisers, sponsors and corporate media. Where I don’t have to worry that a sidebar ad for flat tummy tea will run alongside my explanation of why the ob*sity epidemic is over-hyped. A place where I can publish the stories I can’t tell in other outlets because they are too niche or aren’t newsy enough, but still matter deeply to people’s lives.