Welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast! This is a newsletter where we explore questions and some answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. And today, I’m really pleased to be chatting with Anna Sweeney, who is a social-justice oriented disabled dietitian. You probably Anna know from Instagram where she is @dietitiananna. She is also behind the awesome “You’re Nicer With Carbs” t-shirts.I just ordered a shirt this morning, I’m super excited about it. Anna, welcome.AnnaThank you so much.VirginiaI’m really into the t-shirt. It took me a long time to pick a color. I might need more than one. It’s really good.Anna I am just digging on the mug. I use it as a communication vehicle. When I’m talking to people on Zoom, like, read my mug.Virginia Alright, now I need the mug, too!Why don’t we start with you telling us about you and your work?AnnaI am an eating disorder dietitian, I’m very fortunate to have dedicated the last, I think 13 years of my life to this field, which has become for me increasingly about social justice, in every single way. I’m so fortunate to have the following that I do on social media. I don’t know how that happened. But I am most grateful that it did. I’m just a multi-privileged person who is trying to use that privilege for good and make people a little bit uncomfortable in the process.Virginia I love it. It is not an accident that your Instagram has done so well, because you do a great job of communicating around very complex issues in a very thoughtful way. You have so much practical advice on there for people and you’re having really important conversations. So thank you for doing that.I also want to tell listeners how we first got to know each other. I interviewed you for my first book, which some folks will have read, but for folks who haven’t, Anna appears in chapter two of The Eating Instinct, which is called Chasing Clean. And it’s where I explored how the diet industry became the wellness industry, but is still the diet industry. Anna shares her own story of living with multiple sclerosis and the ways in which the wellness industry preys on folks with chronic conditions and promises miracle cures through food and diet. And she’s rolling her eyes.So debunking these kinds of myths and scams is still a big part of the work you do on social and it’s so important. But as someone else who also tries to do that, it can really feel like we’re playing whack-a-mole, because there’s always a new trend, a new celery juice or whatever. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on why that core message of “if you control your food, you’ll control your life and your health” is still resonating with people even when we see over and over that there’s nothing there?AnnaIf you are suffering by virtue of living with a chronic illness or just want to extend or enhance your life, or you are told by your doctors and your friends and the world that your body is a problem because of its size, it makes so much sense that the diet industry—which is really no longer the diet industry, it really is about that core value of “wellness”—preys on that. The messaging is really, really pervasive. There are going to be people who say, I did this thing, I cured myself, I healed myself of secondary progressive MS. Which is not a thing that you can do, because that is not how Multiple Sclerosis works.I am an educated person, and as my disease changed, I wanted to also heal myself of a secondary progressive disease, which I know is impossible but I tried anyway. And, you know, I think the messaging is so pervasive but also so shape-shifting. This is about morality, and if you’re not trying for this thing, well, then you’re not trying and you deserve whatever malady you get.VirginiaIt’s really preying on people’s very real fears, and processing the ways in which ou