NOTE: We're planning a special AMA episode of the podcast and we want your burning questions! Please submit your questions via this Google Form to help us stay organized.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast and newsletter where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. We don’t have a brand new episode for you today because I’m on spring break this week. As many of you know, I used to co-host another podcast with my best friend Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. Our podcast was called Comfort Food and we had to retire it in 2020, for a whole lot of reasons. Amy has given me her blessing to occasionally pull some of our best episodes and share them, which I’m really excited to do because there were a lot of great conversations. A lot of these are more parenting-focused, but I’m hoping everyone can get something out of it.The episode I am sharing today first aired on March 5, 2020, right before the world shut down. Definitely do listen to this like you’re a historian, looking back at our earlier work. You can see where a lot of my thinking on these issues started—I don’t think I was all the way there yet. We’re all works in progress. In particular, Amy and I were really just beginning to understand how we wanted to talk about kid diet culture on Instagram. You’ll hear moments where we’re both chafing against some diet mentality of our own. I think we do a pretty good job of naming those things as they come up, but I just want to be clear that I wouldn’t necessarily repeat all of this today and neither would Amy. If that makes you nervous or if you’re worried about potential for harm, certainly feel free to skip this one. We do talk about different forms of restrictive eating. If that’s something you’re interested in hearing and puzzling out with us and you bump on something as you’re listening, feel free to put it in the comments so we can discuss! I welcome that accountability and the chance to revisit and give you a take on where I would land now. Episode 39 TranscriptVirginiaHello and welcome to episode 65 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmyThis week we’re exploring how food restriction can creep into our everyday without us even really being aware of it, and the impacts that this can have on our own relationship with food and the way that we’re feeding our kids.This topic has been on my mind lately because often when we talk about food restriction, we think of it as a calorie counting diet or strict portion control, but there are a lot of other ways that it can creep in and cause harm or confusion, or just make us not super clear on our goals with both how we eat and how we’re feeding our kids.VirginiaTotally. I have also had those moments of kind of recognizing in yourself that this is a restriction thing. It can just pop up because it’s so conditioned into us. This might sound a little radical, but if you think back to like elementary school, when we were given the food pyramid—the food pyramid may not be the most harmful diet out there, but it still was like teaching us this hierarchy of foods, good and bad and less of this and more of that. It’s really difficult with kids who think so concretely in black and white about food, to tell kids how to eat in that way. Then we all grow up and get into diet culture, and more messages and more messages about restriction. So I think restriction is like at the core of how a lot of people interact with food in ways they just don’t even realize.AmyIt’s extra hard, because as you’re talking about that my gut reaction is “but I want my kids to eat more nutritious foods.” How do you do that without limiting the other foods? Some foods tastes better than others and that’s the primary driver that kids have when they’re eating. They want it to taste good. They don’t have the capacity to understand about nutrients in different foods. VirginiaNor should they! That’s not