The sheet-pan chicken and roasted broccoli are out of the oven. Virginia Sole-Smith, who has spent a decade writing about how women think and feel about their bodies — and how they pass along those feelings to their children through food — is about to serve dinner to her daughters, Violet, 10, and Beatrix, 6.
Sole-Smith tries not to be a short-order cook. “Respect the labour,” is how she puts it, reminding her children that if they don’t like what she has prepared, there’s other stuff to eat in the house.
What Sole-Smith hopes to model, she said in an interview at her home in Cold Spring, New York, is “that you can be a mom who doesn’t live solely in service of other people”.
A year ago, Sole-Smith published Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, a guide to helping parents grapple with their discomfort and anxiety about weight and food. At the moment when Ozempic-like drugs are enabling people to become thin, Sole-Smith has become one of the country’s most visible fat activists, calling out the bias and discrimination faced by people in bigger bodies.
She asserts her own right to be “fat”, the preferred adjective in her corner of the internet. In Sole-Smith’s house there are neither “good” or “bad” foods, nor “healthy” or “unhealthy” ones. By relieving herself and her family of rules about eating, Sole-Smith believes she will have a better chance of raising children who are proud of their bodies, trust themselves to enjoy their food and leave the table when they’re full. She serves dessert and snacks along with the dinner entree; her kids can eat their meal in any order.
Fat Talk is, in a way, Sole-Smith’s manifesto of liberation from what nutritionists call “diet culture”: the enormous pressure American women, in particular, feel to be thin and to raise thin children. For many years, she covered health (including for The New York Times), and her reporting on the pursuit of thinness prompted her rejection of it.
For Sole-Smith, “diet culture” has come to symbolise all the crushing expectations under which American women live. In her Substack newsletter and podcast, Burnt Toast, she muses on whether hewing to a household budget, gardening only with native plants or limiting kids’ screen time can be regarded as diets.
Sole-Smith separated from her husband Dan Upham in June and in that upheaval has had to reconsider many family rituals, including dinner. Sole-Smith and Upham attempted a regular dinner hour, but when they split, neither child wanted to come to the table at all. And then Sole-Smith hit on a fix: she released her kids from the pressure to politely converse by allowing them to read at the table.
No pro-weight-loss comments allowed
Sole-Smith has emerged as an inspirational, infuriating voice on the subject of bodies at a moment when there is no neutral zone. Since Fat Talk became a New York Times bestseller in May, Burnt Toast has grown to nearly 50,000 subscribers. In Sole-Smith’s reader survey, about half of her audience identified as “fat”. On Burnt Toast no pro-weight-loss comments are allowed.
The most fervent 10 per cent of Burnt Toast adherents pay US$50 or more per year for extra content, which provides Sole-Smith an annual salary of about US$200,000, (about $339,000) twice as much as she ever made as a freelance writer.
Sole-Smith relies on scientific research to bolster her message. Data shows that being shamed about weight is linked to depression, anxiety and social isolation, as well as poor physical health. Significant weight loss through dieting is extremely hard to sustain. Bias from doctors can lead to avoidance of medical care and worse health outcomes. Eating disorders are common in people in larger bodies.
“The consequences are clearly demonstrated,” said Kelly Brownell, a professor emeritus of public policy at Duke University who has spent five decades studying obesity and its prevention. “They’re social in nature, psychological and medical, too. When you add all that up, it clearly means that weight stigma is having an impact on health.”
The relationship between weight and health is extremely complex, and longitudinal studies can’t predict any individual’s vulnerability to disease. Still, decades of research demonstrates a strong association between excess fat and increased risk of five of the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States: cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and liver disease.
“I think it’s possible to simultaneously hold in your mind that the condition of obesity is concerning, while at the same time protecting the rights of the people who have it,” Brownell said. “You can think of many other parallels, like depression or alcoholism, where you don’t want the people who have these things to be stigmatised — there are clearly negative effects of that — but it doesn’t mean you discount the ravages of those diseases.”
Like most internet personalities, Sole-Smith deploys her persona — a self-confident suburban mother — in service of her battle cry: a body is not anyone else’s problem to solve. Sole-Smith does not dispute that in some cases, excess fat may contribute to disease, but she believes that weight stigma is “the foundation of everything about weight and health that nobody has been looking at for so long”. She is part of a fractious, vocal band of activists and advocates who argue that the real epidemic is bias, not obesity.
‘What your body is meant to be’
Sole-Smith was raised by divorced parents in Guilford, Connecticut, an affluent suburb of New Haven.
Through her father, Sole-Smith belongs to the family that founded H.D. Smith, a national pharmaceutical wholesaler acquired in 2018 by AmerisourceBergen. “It was the backstory of my life, and it does shape my life,” Sole-Smith said. “It provides a lot of financial security for my family,” she added.
Sole-Smith started out in women’s magazines in the early 2000s, when “thin” equalled “healthy”. She didn’t consider herself a dieter, but she scheduled her workday around her trips to the gym, which in turn were timed around reruns of The West Wing, because, she said, “I could only stand to be on the treadmill if I was watching The West Wing.”
She did not begin to reconsider her relationship to food and fat until 2013, when Violet, then 4 weeks old, was diagnosed with a severe congenital heart defect. Violet required a dozen surgeries, and for most of the first two years of her life was fed through tubes. One consequence was that when she was physically strong enough, she did not know how to eat.
The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America, Sole-Smith’s first book, published in 2018, described how she learned to relinquish her fantasies about motherhood and nourishing her child so that Violet might survive. The Eating Instinct offered up “intuitive eating”, a feeding method established in the 1990s that suggested that all the old rules — “clean your plate” and “no dessert until after dinner” — might not apply. When Violet was 2, Sole-Smith and Upham had to overcome their acculturated anxieties about the sugar and fat in chocolate milk. Violet started drinking half a gallon each week.
In Cold Spring, Sole-Smith said she would write the book very differently today. For one thing, she was still using the words “obese” and “obesity” without qualification. And some part of her was blaming people in bigger bodies for a lack of discipline. “I was still thinking at that point that a fat body was a problem to solve,” she said, “versus this is what your body is meant to be.”
A job becomes a calling
Sole-Smith didn’t have a moment of radicalisation. It was more like a gradual shift in perspective. After The Eating Instinct, she began to encounter ideas she hadn’t previously grappled with, she said.
In 2019, Sole-Smith read Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which reframes the cultural and medical concern about obesity as “a way to craft and legitimate race, sex and class hierarchies”. Sole-Smith started to absorb the larger capitalist critique: even fat activism had been co-opted by women’s magazines, advertisers and fitness companies and turned into “body positivity”, a defanged version that “really centres, you know, ‘small fat’ white women like me”, Sole-Smith said, using the identifier she learned around then.
Sole-Smith began to feel that her freelance specialty, analysing obesity research studies for editors at mainstream publications, was “just exhausting and not moving the needle”. She increasingly felt that discrimination was the problem, not proving or disproving that excess fat made people sick. Upham saw a change come over her. “When she was in magazines, that was a job. This felt more like a calling,” he said.
In September 2020, Sole-Smith wrote What If Doctors Stopped Prescribing Weight Loss?, an article that evoked the analogy between weight stigma and racism. By then, she had given up trying to dress to de-emphasise her shape. She had moved, definitively, into plus sizes, and found freedom in finally accepting herself.
Answering critics by eating brownies
Ozempic became a national obsession in the winter of 2023, just as Sole-Smith was heading out to promote Fat Talk, giving her a foothold in the news cycle that she could not have anticipated.
That January, Sole-Smith wrote an opinion piece for the Times responding to new guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics that recommended Ozempic-like drugs for a subset of obese children as young as 12. The first chapter of Fat Talk is titled “The Myth of the Childhood Obesity Epidemic,” and in her article, she wrote, “We cannot solve anti-fat bias by making fat kids thin.”
This view prompted an outcry. Dr Barry Reiner, a pediatric endocrinologist in Baltimore, was “personally infuriated”, he said. Historically, Type 2 diabetes has been an adult-onset disease, but “for the past several years, I’ve been seeing a lot more of it”, Reiner said.
In his newsletter ConscienHealth, Ted Kyle, who formerly worked in obesity policy for GlaxoSmithKline, called out Sole-Smith for ignoring facts. He linked to a study from Yale University that showed a rising prevalence of fatty liver disease during the pandemic among children with obesity — a condition that can lead to “liver cancer, cirrhosis and death”, Kyle wrote.
Then, in April, Sole-Smith went on Fresh Air and offered a political analysis. “Celebrating a thin white body as the ideal body is a way to other and demonise Black and brown bodies, bigger bodies, anyone who doesn’t fit into that norm,” she said. Social media predictably exploded at this.
In May, after Fat Talk hit the bestseller list, Sole-Smith took a victory lap on Instagram. Wearing a bright pink dress, she posted some of the hate messages she had received. “I can see why you’re single. No one wants to spend time with a fat slob shoving pizza in her fat mouth,” read one. As these notes flashed across the screen, she ostentatiously ate a brownie.
Earlier in our conversation in Cold Spring, Sole-Smith talked about all the ways in which every person undermines their own health, by drinking alcohol, say, or opting out of the gym. During dinner, this question of autonomy came up again, in a more philosophical way. I asked Sole-Smith what it meant to make less-than-optimal choices about personal health in the name of autonomy when others are dependent on you.
“Health is a resource and a privilege so many people don’t have access to,” Sole-Smith began. There are mothers who are substance users, older mothers and mothers with congenital health conditions. No parent has an obligation to pursue good health, and to believe so “is fundamentally a very ableist perspective”, she said.
She continued, “Is health that I eat this broccoli for dinner? Or is health that I managed to have a few minutes of connection with my daughter today?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Lisa Miller
Photographs by: Marisa Langley
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES