I remember the my daughter’s gastroenterologist saying, “Wow, you’ve really found a lot of great foods.” And, “We have so many patients who are less compliant than you.” I said, “Well, you know, it was really hard. It was, at minimum, a halftime job. Do all of your patients, families have the time and energy for this?” And he said, “Well probably not.”Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m chatting with Debi Lewis, author of the beautiful new memoir Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter Out of Failure to Thrive. Debi has also written for the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Huffington Post, and many other outlets. She lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and teenage daughters. This conversation is close to my heart. As most listeners know, my own daughter spent the first two years of her life dependent on a feeding tube. So reading Debi’s memoir hit home in all sorts of ways that we talk about, but I think this is a book that will resonate with so many of you. If you are a parent who has fed a kid—even if it went swimmingly, without medical complications—there is so much here that you will relate to about Debi’s journey, and the struggle to live up to external expectations about what feeding our kids looks like, and what it means for motherhood. CW: We do discuss critically ill kids, medical trauma, and fatphobic comments that people (maddeningly) make in those situations. Take care of yourself. PS. Friends! The Burnt Toast Giving Circle raised over $6,000 in less than a week! I am so insanely proud of us. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s last week’s Burnt Toast ICYMI and the link to donate. Episode 35 TranscriptVirginiaHi Debi! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, and your work?DebiMy name is Debi Lewis and I am the mom of two teenage girls, 19 and 16, and married to my husband and we live in the suburbs of Chicago. This is my first book that I’m very excited to share with all of your listeners. And in the rest of my day I make websites.VirginiaWe are here to talk about your new book Kitchen Medicine and when this episode airs, it will be your launch week. So folks, it’s in bookstores everywhere! It is just the most beautiful memoir of your experiences feeding your daughter, Sammi, who was diagnosed with failure to thrive at a really young age. Let’s start by talking a little bit about that failure to thrive diagnosis. Tell us about your experience with it, because I think it is such a horrific term in a lot of ways. It’s both very common and deeply misunderstood.DebiI think there’s a lot of things wrong with the term. “Failure to thrive” is not a very specific diagnosis. It’s kind of a catchall and the real search is for why. Why would you diagnose a child with that? It’s not the end, it’s a symptom. And the other problem is that it’s a wildly inaccurate term. Because if you had met my daughter during most of the years in which she fell under that umbrella of “failure to thrive,” you would never look at her and think this child is not thriving. This was a pink cheeked, energetic, bubbly, cute little girl, meeting all her developmental milestones except for the ones that required her to be tall enough. FTT was really diagnosing the fact that she wasn’t growing on the trajectory that doctors wanted. If you looked over many years, you could see that that growth trajectory was her own and steady and she didn’t drop very often and it was nothing that, in retrospect, I should have been worried about. But because she was tiny and because she wasn’t getting less tiny compared to her peers, we kept hearing that. And the way that diagnosis comes out is when a doctor or nurse points their finger at the parent and kind of wags it a little and says, "Whoops, Mom! She’s still failure to thrive! Got to get a few more calories in her," as though that isn’t the one thing you spend most of your lif