We need our own place to critique diet culture and combat fatphobia, without the continual compromise required by corporate media. And, we need this podcast. Because you will never need to worry that the host is going to pause mid-episode and tell you how much I love Noom.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we explore questions (and some answers) about fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct, the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia and the newsletter Burnt Toast. This is technically Episode 24 of the Burnt Toast podcast, but also for a lot of you it’s going to be Episode 1. So we’ll start with some backstory on how I went from a writer of women’s magazine diet stories to a diet culture dismantler and why having a space to do independent, anti-diet journalism is so important, right now. I’ll also be answering your questions: How to help a 3-year-old who won’t stop grazing? How can we respond thoughtfully to casual fatphobia? What should I do if I’m a houseguest and my host is on a diet? And can my kid really eat ice cream every day? If you enjoy this episode please subscribe and rate and review Burnt Toast in your podcast player. And sign up for the Burnt Toast newsletter, to get episode transcripts, reported essays and more. [Editor’s Note: Regular newsletter readers will recognize the first half of this episode from this essay. Feel free to scroll down to the next line break to get to your questions!]So, I thought today we would start with some backstory. Eighteen years ago I graduated from college and started my first job the very next day as an editorial assistant at Seventeen Magazine. I was living in a shoebox studio apartment next to the Queens Midtown Tunnel. I walked to work in my Reef flip flops because I couldn’t actually stand up for more than ten minutes in the shoes we wore around the office. I made $27,000 a year. But for those first few months, I was in heaven at Seventeen. My bosses were these smart, feminist editors who thought that the intelligence of teenage girls was undervalued. We did features on things like hookup culture and youth marketing. And yes, I realized that last one now sounds a little ironic. One of my tasks as an assistant at the magazine was to track down statistics or expert quotes when the editors were working on a feature and realized that it needed some things like that, that the writers had failed to deliver. Seventeen is where I started to learn how to report.I was learning to report in a way that would pass muster with our research chief who was this completely terrifying person who would throw your reporting file out of her office if you tried to use a non-primary source or a newspaper, or couldn’t backup a controversial fact to her liking. Yes, this is the same Seventeen that published “I got my period in front of my crush,” the horror stories you remember from Trauma-Rama. And yes, this is the same Seventeen that first published Sylvia Plath. I learned really quickly that being a feminist in women’s media, but also all mainstream media, meant that you had to hold these strands together as lightly as you could. It meant successfully pitching a story on birth control, only to have your editor write in the margins, “But wait, isn’t Plan B the same thing as having an abortion?” No, it is not. And it meant every day reading letters from girls who hated their thighs, girls who tried to cut the fat off their stomachs, girls who skipped breakfast and made themselves throw up after lunch, girls who were trying to shrink their bodies in every conceivable way. And then going into a meeting where we would brainstorm five new ways to put the phrase “bikini body” on the cover.I didn’t last long at Seventeen. A few months after I was hired, a new editor came in with a new team and a new vision. Suddenly there was a lot less meticulous reporting about teenage heal