Can I Have Another Snack? (Laura Thomas, PhD, RNutr)

It's time for part 2 of our November ALL OF THE SNACKS podcast. If you missed part 1 then check it out on the CIHAS site, or scroll back in your podcast app. Part 1 was a available to all listeners, but part 2 is a paid subscriber-only bonus episode. 

In this episode, CIHAS audio engineer Lucy Dearlove and I answer your questions on:

👉 The trifecta that is PCOS, insulin resistance and perimenopause

👉 How to feed your kids when the internet tells us everything is bad for them

👉 Plus we take a trip down memory lane as we discuss nostalgic party food

Free subscribers can listen to a trailer of this episode above and if you'd like to listen in full and access the transcript for this episode, upgrade your membership here. As well as access to this episode, you'll unlock all my Dear Laura posts, Snacky Bits threads and loads more!

Today I'm talking to nutritionist Jennifer Nash (who is also the newest member of the CIHAS team). In this conversation we're talking about the NCMP, particularly the research Jennifer undertook as part of her Masters course, as well as the work Jennifer has done with Body Happy Org to address some of the issues with the way nutrition is taught in schools.

In this episode we discuss:

👉 Jennifer's recent research into experiences of the NCMP and the harm that appears to be being caused by this programme
👉 Some of the issues with how nutrition is taught in primary schools     
👉 The food-positive scheme of work Jennifer created for Body Happy Org                                                                                                             
👉 How we can tell our teachers and schools about these resources to help foster a body- and food-positive culture in schools

Come and let us know what you thought of the episode in the comments over on canihaveanothersnack.com. If you'd like to sign up to receive bonus podcasts from CIHAS, you can upgrade your subscription here.

Today I'm talking to therapist Vicky Bellman from Concentric Counselling and Fat Bubble about protecting our kids from the weird diet culture things people say that can rupture their embodiment. I loved talking to Vicky and think you'll get so much from this conversation.

In this episode we discuss:

👉 The 'hot potato' of disordered eating and disembodiment that gets transmitted through families
👉 How to shut down body shaming conversations in their tracks
👉 How we can transmit healing back up the line, as well as protect our kids
👉 How every day we protect our kids against diet culture is a day we
👉 Why body positivity and food neutrality are not the whole story

You can follow Vicky on Instagram here.
Head to Can I Have Another Snack? to read along with the transcript and sign-up for free to get new episodes and other cool things delivered to your inbox! Leave a rating and review in your podcast player to help more people find this pod!

Today I'm talking to the brilliant Jade Eloise, fat liberationist and mental health practitioner. Jade explores body image through their art, writing and poetry, and is the co-founder of Fat Lib London, an inclusive community space for people in fat and otherwise marginalised bodies.

In this episode, we cover:

👉 The death of the body positivity movement - we talk about what attracted Jade to the BoPo movement in the first place, and discuss how it has been co-opted by capitalism and no longer represents a safe space for fat bodies

👉 The difference between body positivity and fat liberation and the intersections with other liberatory politics

👉 How Jade and their co-conspirators Simran and Niki are creating a safe and nurturing community for fat folks through Fat Lib London

👉 Plus, as always, what we're snacking on atm

Let us know your thoughts on this episode over on canihaveanothersnack.com. If you'd like to sign up to receive bonus podcasts from CIHAS, you can upgrade your subscription here.

It's time for your December instalment of ALL OF THE SNACKS. A paid subscriber-only bonus episode where myself and our audio engineer Lucy Dearlove answer listener questions.

In this episode we're getting festive and answering questions about:

👉 How to deal with comments from family about 'bad' foods, as well as setting boundaries about body talk over the holidays
👉 Our favourite festive foods 
👉 Mince pie propaganda
👉 Plus some great foodie-related gift suggestions for kids and adults 

Free subscribers can listen to a trailer of this episode above and if you'd like to listen in full and access the transcript for this episode, upgrade your membership here. As well as access to this episode, you'll unlock all my Dear Laura posts, Snacky Bits threads and loads more!

Let us know what you thought of the episode over at canihaveanothersnack.com.

This is a teaser of a subscriber only-episode. Head to canihaveanothersnack.com to upgrade your subscription and access the full episode.

Today I’m joined by CIHAS audio engineer and host of the podcast Lecker, Lucy Dearlove, to answer listener and reader questions. Tune in to hear us:

• Revive and old classic (DSMG fans, this one’s for you!)
• Share non-lame-gym-bro snack ideas for pre/post workout
• Explain why a certain gut health shot is a lot like a bad night out
• Talking about why it’s important to be calm in the face of a new medical diagnosis rather than falling into diet culture
• Offering some advice towards handling the challenges of co-parenting with someone whose views on diet culture are very different from your own
• And lastly, why you should ignore influencers who boast about their kids eating stilton and sushi

Hey-O. Lucy and I are BACK with your October instalment of ALL OF THE SNACKS - a bonus pod for paying subscribers where we answer YOUR questions. 

This month we're answering Qs about:

👉 The problems with how kids get fed at school, and advocating for your kids if they get hungry during the school day
👉 Whether we need to worry about glucose spikes like the Glucose Goddess tells us (and if its relevant for two year-olds?!)
👉 The difference between boundaries and restrictions when feeding kids, along with personal insight into the boundaries in our home
👉 Plus a cookbook and film recommendation

To listen to the full episode, upgrade your membership here. Paying subscribers have full access to listen on the website or in your podcast player via an invite with a private RSS feed (please get in touch at hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk if you're having any trouble with this!) Come and let us know what you thought of this episode in the comments at canihaveanothersnack.com.

Today I'm talking to the incredible Alex Light, a body acceptance advocate and author of You Are Not a Before Picture. In this conversation we're talking about all the really insidious and toxic messaging we get around postpartum bodies. 

In this episode we discuss:

👉 Snapback culture and the horrendous ways it shows up for birthing people

👉 How our bodies can change during and after pregnancy and the shame often associated with this

👉 The anti-fatness of '9 months in, 9 months out' pictures

👉 Ways to help protect your embodiment in the postpartum period

Come and let us know what you thought of the episode in the comments over on canihaveanothersnack.com. If you'd like to sign up to receive bonus podcasts from CIHAS, you can upgrade your subscription here.

You can follow Alex on Instagram here and Laura, over here

This episode is a rerun of my conversation last year with the fantastic Molly Forbes, journalist, campaigner and non-profit founder. She's the author of the book Body Happy Kids: How to help children and teens love the skin they're in and now Every Body, a book for 9-12 year olds helping them learn that body differences should be celebrated. She's also the Founding Director of The Body Happy Organisation CIC, a social enterprise dedicated to promoting positive body image in children.

In this episode Molly and I discuss:

 👉 What the NCMP is, what it looks like in different schools and some of the issues associated with it
👉 Why you might want to opt your kid out and how you even do that
👉 What you can do if you’re worried about your child feeling left out if they’re the only ones left in the classroom

I really hope you will share this episode with your school WhatsApp group, your friendship group and with the teachers in your schools to help end the tyranny of the NCMP. You can also share Body Happy Org and Anybody UK’s informed decision making pack and my writing on the NCMP.

Ok so here's what happened: as we do every month, Lucy and I resolved to keep our answers snappy when we recorded our monthly ALL OF THE SNACKS episode. But instead we did the opposite and talked for like 90 mins. Rather than cutting a bunch of stuff, we decided to split the episode into two parts. 

Part 1 is here, right now where we're covering:
👉 our varying success at DIY
👉 whether glucosamine supps might actually (maybe) be worth a shot? 
👉 And what if your teen becomes obsessed with protein and gains.

In part 2 (dropping in 2 weeks), we're going to talk about:
👉 the trifecta that is PCOS, insulin resistance and perimenopause.
👉Plus how to feed your kids when *everything is bad for them*
👉 And finally, nostalgic party foods

Part 2 will be for paid dudes only. Get that and our monthly back catalogue of All Of The Snacks episodes with myself and Lucy by becoming a member of the Snack Pack. It's £5/mo or £50 per year and you get access to the entire CIHAS universe, including weekly discussion threads and my monthly advice column, Dear Laura. 

Enjoy the show!

P.S. Don't forget to drop your questions for me and Lucy here, or for Dear Laura here. 

Today I'm talking to the incredible Humaira Mayet, a dietitian and activist interested in how racism and imperialism have shaped the profession. We cover so much in this episode, including: 

👉  Humaira's Master’s thesis, which explores the experiences of South Asian Muslims navigating cardiometabolic disease in the UK, as well as the impact of Islamophobia and structural racism in healthcare

👉 The true meaning of 'decolonisation' and how the health and nutrition sphere has co-opted the term for tools like the EatWell plate

👉 Surveillance and profiling in society, such as Prevent Duty, and how it plays out on the body, as it transfers from state- to self-surveillance 

👉 The life-affirming work of anti-facism and how public health is really about safeguarding populations and reaffirming their right to life

👉 Plus, as always, what we're snacking on atm

Let us know your thoughts on this episode over on canihaveanothersnack.com. If you'd like to sign up to receive bonus podcasts from CIHAS, you can upgrade your subscription here.

Hey-O. Lucy and I are BACK with your July installment of ALL OF THE SNACKS - a bonus pod for paying subscribers where we answer YOUR questions. 

This month we're answering Qs about:

👉 How to talk to kids about oral health without falling into the diet culture trap and scaremongering sugar

👉 What toxic wellness things we can’t let go of

👉 How to tell when a nutrition ‘expert’ is legit or just a quack

👉 And some thoughts on supporting Autistic kids who seem ‘insatiable’

👉 Plus a controversial snack…

Come and let us know what you thought of this episode in the comments at canihaveanothersnack.com
If you'd like to listen to this episode in full then upgrade your membership here. 

If you're already a paid subscriber, you should have received an email with an invite to your private RSS feed and instructions on how to add it to your podcast player (or you can listen to it on the website - click here). If you have any problems then email me on hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk. But fr, check your spam because it's probably there.

This is a preview of this month's All of The Snacks with Laura and Lucy. If you'd like to listen to the episode in full then click here to upgrade. And if you're already a paid up member of the Snack Pack, then check your email for instructions to add a private RSS feed to your podcast player, or login on Can I Have Another Snack? to listen there.

Alright, this month we're talking about:

👉 Our thoughts on whether 'intuitive movement' is the 'right' way to approach exercise (and boy do we have feelings about this one!)

👉 Why baby food throwing food might not be the huge deal the internet would have you believe...

👉 Plus we lean into Lucy's clothes mending expertise to figure out what to do when we wear through the inner thighs of our jeans (a recurring theme in my life)

👉 And, ofc, we talk about ALL of the snacks. The ease with which I accept 'cheesy flapjacks' as an answer is honestly, astounding. C.C. Lucy, do we have a recipe for this???

👉 Oh and a round of cheese or chocolate (IYKYK)

if you'd like us to answer your question on next month's show, you can submit it here.

Music used in this trailer "Study And Relax"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

HEYO! Surprise Tuesday bonus pod alert!!

Lucy and I are back to take a deep dive into whether a diagnosis of 'high cholesterol' means you need to go on a diet.

Listener M wrote in with the question: I'm very interested in the correlation between high cholesterol and what we eat. It seems to me that the high cholesterol always comes with the diet stuff. Less red meat, less fat in the diet, etc. Is this really true? It feels very shameful to have high cholesterol that you have somehow behaved badly. A sign (almost like being fat) that there is something wrong with you. (Or your diet.) Can you clear this up for me?'

We went deep and discussed:

🫘 What a diagnosis of 'high cholesterol' really means
♥️ What function cholesterol plays in the body (and why we need it!)
🫘  The difference between HDL and LDL cholesterol (and why you can'd ascribe moral value to molecules that float around in your blood)
♥️ Whether weight-loss actually helps lower cholesterol
🫘 Some social and structural reasons we might experience higher LDL cholesterol
♥️ How we can support our heart health sans diets
🫘 Gentle nutrition pointers and some great recipe ideas for caring for ourselves if we have 'wonky' cholesterol

This is a preview of a bonus episode for Snack Pack members. To upgrade your account and listen to the full episode in your own private RSS feed (as well as tons of other great perks) feed, click here. And head to Can I Have Another Snack? for the Cliff Notes version of this episode.

If you're already a member of the Snack Pack, look in your email for an email from Transistor.fm for details of how to access your private RSS feed. Or login to your account at Can I Have Another Snack?

Today I'm talking to the brilliant Alison Perry, Instagrammer, writer, and host of the Not Another Mummy Podcast, about reclaiming your mojo mid-life, especially after having kids and entering the perimenopause.   

In this episode we discuss:

👉 Alison's peri journey so far, and how the peri space is rife with diet culture, toxic wellness messaging, and anti fatness                        

👉 Supporting kids in their changing bodies (especially when our own bodies are also changing)

👉 What it means to reclaim your confidence mid-life and embrace being fat and fabulous!

Come and let us know what you thought of the episode in the comments over on canihaveanothersnack.com. If you'd like to sign up to receive bonus podcasts from CIHAS, you can upgrade your subscription here.

Your February ALL OF THE SNACKS episode is here! A paid subscriber-only bonus episode where myself and our audio engineer Lucy Dearlove answer listener questions.

Coming up in this episode: 

👉 One listener who's feeling frustrated with badly designed clothing asks Lucy for advice about getting into sewing and patterns, so they can make clothes that actually fit
👉 What the 30/30/30 method actually is and precisely how it is BS
👉 Feelings about air fryers - are they convenient cooking or is diet culture doing a one over on us?
👉 Plus, as always, what we're snacking on atm.

Free subscribers can listen to a trailer above, and if you'd like to listen to the episode in full (and access the transcript below), upgrade your membership here. As well as access to the bonus podcasts, you'll unlock all my Dear Laura posts, Snacky Bits threads and loads more.

Let us know your thoughts on the episode over at www.canihaveanothersnack.com.

Hey team and welcome to Can I Have Another Snack? and a bonus free pod for you.

This month we got sent a listener question about Emily Oster's take on a study about sugar rationing and whether that leads to better metabolic outcomes for kids. Since there is sooo much chat about sugar right now, we thought we'd answer it in a Rapid Response/Dear Laura/All of the Snacks mash up - so here it is, a bonus free podcast with my take on Emily O.

For paying subscribers, I go into a ton more depth in a Dear Laura post (dropping on Thursday) about the history of so-called ‘natural experiments’, what this study actually says, and Emily’s response. It’s a little less off-the-cuff than this conversation and digs into the nuance of how they reported the stats a bit more. If you're not yet a paying subscriber and want to read that, do the thing here.

Let me know what you thought of the episode over in the comments at canihaveanothersnack.com.

Hey-O. Lucy and I are BACK with your June instalment of ALL OF THE SNACKS - a bonus pod for paying subscribers where we answer YOUR questions. 

This month we're answering Qs about:

👉 Whether or not collagen supplements are snake oil adjacent
👉 Does my kid need a snack drawer or am I feeling the pressure of Kid Food Instagram?
👉 How do I deal with a medical appointment that I know will evoke anti-fatness?
👉 My pre-teen has pocket money and only wants to buy snacks - what do I do?
👉 How can I find my appetite when the world is such a horror-show? 

Plus VERY IMPORTANT Lucy and Laura life updates (and why I am taking my sartorial cues from custard. And, as usual, great snacks. 

If you're a free subscriber, you'll hear a preview of today's episode. If you want to hear the whole thing, you can upgrade your subscription here.

If you're already a paid subscriber, you should have received an email with an invite to your private RSS feed and instructions on how to add it to your podcast player (or you can listen to it on the website - click here). If you have any problems then email me on hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk. But fr, check your spam because it's probably there.

We all know that feeding kids is hard - aside from food neophobia, the constant shopping, cooking, cleaning up the mess, and and the worry of whether they're getting what they need, we have the mental load. All the tiny invisible mental notes, planning, prioritising, and juggling that add up throughout the day that can leave us feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, unsupported, and taken for granted. This week I'm talking to Registered Dietitian Maeve Hanan about something Kid Food Influencers rarely discuss or acknowledge: the mental load of feeding a family. We get into:

👉 The expectations vs. reality of feeding a family
👉 Different types of labour in the home (visible and invisible)
👉 How naming terms like 'mental load' and 'household manager' can help create more equal distribution of labour
👉 How the mental load of feeding a family can influence our relationship with food
👉 The unnecessary mental load we absorb from Kid Food Influencers
👉 How ultra-processed foods have a role in reducing the mental load of feeding a family

Read the transcript at canihaveanothersnack.com and sign up to get future 'sodes delivered to your inbox.
Leave a rating and review in your podcast player to help more people find this pod!
Follow Laura and Maeve on Instagram

Your first ALL OF THE SNACKS episode of 2025 is here!

Listen to the whole episode FOR FREE when you sign up for a month's free trial of CIHAS!

In this episode we're covering the January diet culture noise we're feeling right now, and discussing:

👉 Weight loss injectables and the discourse surrounding them
👉 The Glucose Goddess' new Channel 4 TV show, Eat Smart: Secrets of the Glucose Goddess
👉 M&S's new health and wellness ranges - Brain Food and YAY! Mushrooms (who even came up with that name)
👉 and The New York Times' UPF January health challenge - plus, as always, what we're snacking on atm

You can listen to a free trailer of this episode above, but if you'd like to listen in full (and access the transcript), upgrade your membership here. As well as the bonus podcasts, you'll unlock all my Dear Laura posts, Snacky Bits threads and loads more. We're offering a month-long free trial this January, so get it whilst it lasts!

Let us know your thoughts on this episode over on canihaveanothersnack.com.

Today I'm talking to the brilliant Dr. Kamila Irvine, senior lecturer in body image and eating disorders at the University of Lincoln, where she teaches and researches all things body image in the context of eating disorders and beyond. 

In this podcast we discuss:

👉  Some of Kamila's areas of research, including the impact study she's doing with Body Happy Org

👉  The National Child Measurement Programme (or NCMP) and what happens after a child has been weighed at school and referred to a weight management service

👉  The research paper she's working on on 'Fat Clubs', which documents individuals' experiences of being referred to weight management services as a child

👉 Plus, as always, what we're snacking on atm

Come and let us know what you thought of the episode in the comments over on canihaveanothersnack.com. If you'd like to sign up to receive bonus podcasts from CIHAS, you can upgrade your subscription here.

Hey team! Welcome to episode three of the CIHAS pod, season 2. This week, I’m joined by Dr. Emma Svanberg - clinical psychologist, speaker and campaigner with expertise in attachment and perinatal psychology - AKA Mumologist on IG. In this episode, we focus on some of the stories that we bring to parenting, and the socially constructed ideas we have about parenting. We talk about how sometimes looking for all the advice and answers actually takes us farther away from what we’re looking for, and I ask Emma why she thinks we’re so drawn to advice from so-called parenting experts. Finally, we talk about how we can sift through all the noise of parenting advice, and find what’s best for us and for our kids and learn to leave the rest.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Emma’s here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Emma: If we are stuck on that idea that this is, you know, the kinda cognitive, that intellectual idea that this is what should happen, it becomes so hard to see our child's experience of what it is that we're trying to do. So again, you know, being able to base those things on the relationship. You know what, what did it feel like when I have prepared this food for my child and they have refused it, or actually they're disgusted by it? How does that make me feel? what does that touch on for me as a parent? And often there are such complex issues with that.

INTRO

Laura: Hey, and welcome to another episode of Can I Have Another Snack podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Emma Svanberg. You may know her better as Mumologist on Instagram. Emma is a clinical psychologist, speaker and campaigner with expertise in attachment and perinatal psychology. She's co-founder of Make Birth Better and founded the Psychology Collective in 2019, which is a team of practitioners offering psychological support and guidance for the whole family.

Today we are gonna be talking about Emma's new book, Parenting for Humans, which is out next month and is available to pre-order now. Now, before you get totally freaked out, this book isn't a book that tells you how to be a better parent or to set up new standards or expectations for how you should parent. Rather, the point of the book is to understand how you were parented and all the experiences that you bring to your parenting with the hope of getting to know yourself better and therefore understand what you are bringing to your relationship with your kid. So Emma and I discuss what some of the stories are that we bring to parenting about what we've learned, about what a parent should be from our own experiences, but also what are socially constructed ideas about parenting.

We talk about how sometimes looking for all the advice and answers actually takes us further away from what we're looking for. And I ask Emma why she thinks we're so drawn to advice from so-called parenting experts. Finally, we talk about how we can sift through all the noise of parenting advice and find what's best for us and our kids, and learn to just leave the rest.

So we'll get to Emma in just a minute, but first I wanted to remind you that my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop is on Tuesday, the 21st of February. Don't worry, it's not going to be me giving you a bunch of useless tips and tricks, but we will explore your relationship with food and think about how you can support your kids to have a positive relationship with food and their body. I will also give you some practical tools, but my intention is to help you take the pressure off of feeding your kids and help you create a home that supports a healthy relationship to food and bodies. I've linked to the full description in the show notes, so you can check it out. It's 15 pounds. It will be, um, all on Zoom, and I'll have the recording available for a week afterwards that you can watch on catch up if you like. Plus you'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters Guide to share with friends, family, childcare, and schools. So click the link in the show notes and you'll get the full details of what we're gonna talk about in that workshop. 

And lastly, before we get to Emma, just a quick reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader supported publication. I'd love to bring you more deeply researched pieces, but it requires a significant investment in my time, plus the support of an editor and behind the scenes. Admin support. So if you are in a position to become a paid subscriber, then please consider it. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. It works out at something like 50 p an article. And if that's not accessible for you right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk, putting the word ‘snacks’ in the subject line, and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked. You don't have to explain yourself. I trust that if you are able to afford a subscription right now, you will, and if not, then just get in touch. 

All right, team. Here's my conversation with Dr. Emma Svanberg.

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: All right, Emma, I'd love it if you could start by letting us know who or what you are nourishing right now.

Emma: Well, at the moment I am just in the process of nourishing the, I suppose, the next few weeks that are coming up for me, which are all about my new book, that is coming out in March called Parenting for Humans, which is a funny process, right? Because you sort of just dated over a long period of time. And then, uh, you know, as you know yourself, as we get closer to launch date, there are lots of different kinda angles to think about. So at the moment I'm both nourishing trying to, uh, talk about my book, trying to really kind of get to grips with understanding how it's going to resonate with people. I think that's the kinda key thing for me thinking about the ideas that I really want to kind of get out there into the world while at the same time still nourishing myself and my family as best I can.

Laura: Yeah. I mean, I remember when I published my first book, I didn't have that same, I didn't have any responsibilities to anyone else except myself. and then when the second book came al...

*Content warning* - in this episode, we are talking about pregnancy loss and baby loss as well as experiences in the NICU and breastfeeding challenges. So if you’re not in the headspace for that right now then please take care of yourself and do whatever you need to to look after yourself.

In this episode, journalist, author and fellow Substacker Jennie Agg is joining me on the pod. Jennie has just published her first book, ‘Life, Almost: Miscarriage Misconceptions and a Search for Answers from the Brink of Motherhood’ - an exceptional book which brings together her own experiences, along with expert interviews and reports on why we know so little about fertility and reproductive health.

In our conversation, we focus on the erosion of trust that can happen in your body as a result of losing a pregnancy, and all the difficult emotions that can get stored in our bodies with nowhere to go to be held safely. We also talk a lot about body image and what has been healing for Jenny as she navigates a new relationship with her body post-partum.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Jennie’s work here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Order Jennie’s new book here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Jennie: And piece of that experience is it's, I remember, I mean, it's very difficult to not feel, I remember feeling very angry and very let down by my body. And it's very hard to, to reframe it. I think like I would, this is language that I used internally. It's not language I would use to somebody else or, you know, but you feel like your body has failed you. And I think it's very hard to reframe that as like you, it's very difficult to put a positive spin on that in any way, in the way that sometimes we're encouraged to you with things that are difficult, difficult experiences to do with our, our physical body. 

INTRO

Laura: Hey, and welcome to another episode of the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter? Today I'm talking to author and fellow Subtacker Jennie Agg, who has just written an exceptional book called ‘Life, Almost’.

It weaves together Jennie's own experience with miscarriage and pregnancy loss with expert interviews and impeccable reporting on why we know so very little about fertility and reproductive health. In our conversation today, we're really focused on the erosion of trust that can happen in your body as a result of losing a pregnancy and all the difficult emotions that can get stored in our bodies with nowhere to go to be held safely.

And this is in part because of how isolating the experience can be and how the healthcare system is not at all set up to adequately support people who experience baby loss either in the moment or going forward into a new pregnancy after loss. We also talk a lot about body image and what has been healing for Jennie as she navigates a new relationship with her body postpartum.

I think it's a really lovely conversation and a really important one, but it goes with the content warning that we are talking about pregnancy loss and baby loss as well experiences in the NICU and breastfeeding challenges. So if you're not in the head space for this right now, then please take care of yourself and do whatever you need to to look after yourself.

I know we've had a few authors promoting their books back to back recently. I promise that not all the guests this season will be promoting books. I think maybe we have one more. We will also be hearing from some clinicians and researchers later in the season. Just the way that it worked out with books coming out it ended up that some of those authors are appearing earlier in the season. But I also really wanted to support Jennie because she's been a really supportive cheerleader for me and my work. Some of you might already know that Jennie helps edit some of my essays on the newsletter, and her input is really valuable, and it means that there aren't as many spelling or grammatical mistakes on the copy that Jennie has edited.

So even if trying to conceive or miscarriage aren't on your radar at the moment, I think this is a really important book for anyone who cares about reproductive rights and why we know so little about the health of women and folks with a uterus. It's not just about having a baby, but it's also connected to our autonomy and our collective body liberation.

So again, that's why I wanted to share Jennie's work. It's really, really important and I hope you will check out the book.

We'll get to Jennie in just a minute, but first I wanted to remind you that my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop is on Tuesday, the 21st of February. It's pancake day. Don't worry.

It's not going to be just me giving you a bunch of useless tips and tricks. You know, that's not what I'm about. But we will explore your relationship with food a little bit and think about how you can support your kids to have a positive relationship with food and their body. I will give you some practical tools. Um, we will talk about developmental milestones and things like that, but my intention is really to help. You take the pressure off of feeding your kids and help you create a home that supports a healthy relationship to food and bodies. I've linked to the full description in the show notes. So you can check it out. It's 15 pounds, it will be on Zoom, and I'll have the recording available for a week after. So if you can't watch it live, you can watch it on playback. Plus you'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eater's Guide to share it with family, friends, childcare, schools, whoever is responsible for feeding your kids.

And the last thing before we get to the episode. Just a quick reminder that Can I Have Another Snack is a reader supported publication. I'd love to bring you more deeply research pieces, but it requires a significant investment in my time, plus the support of an editor, aka Jennie, and behind the scenes admin support, and a podcast editor as well.

So if you are in a position to become a paid subscriber, then please consider it is five pounds o...

Joining me on the CIHAS pod this week is writer and poet, Amy Key. Amy has a new book coming out in April called Arrangements in Blue, which explores living in the absence of romantic love. She also wrote this incredible essay for the Vittles Substack called In Praise of Cravings which I was a little skeptical of at first, as you’ll hear us talk about, but which ended up transforming the way I thought about cravings. Amy subverts the idea that we should pathologise our cravings and invites us to explore how food can be a gateway to satisfying non-food cravings as well. Amy also talks really openly about her own relationship with food and how she experienced an eating disorder as a teen, and how part of that healing now is trying on the word fat and noticing how that feels.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Amy’s work here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Pre-order Amy’s book here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Amy: And you're sort of doing all this mental gymnastics that, um, for me just became a huge waste of intellectual effort. And I thought to myself, I'm just not prepared give food that bit of my brain anymore and that much time.

I'd rather focus it on making delicious food that I enjoy to eat, that I enjoy preparing, that I want to share with other people. And also I'm not prepared to be hungry because if I am hungry, I'm thinking about food all the time. And I, you know, I find that I don't really, don't really have like much snacking type habits because I'm satisfied in a way that I don't think I'd previously been. And it was, that was really liberating for me. Just saying, ah, I'm gonna let, just let all that bit of my brain go, cuz let you know, life's too short for me to devote all this brain power to it and I've got other things I could be doing.

INTRO

Laura: Hey, and welcome to another episode of the Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas. I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to the writer and poet Amy Key.

Amy wrote this incredible essay for the Vittles Substack called In Praise of Cravings, and as you'll hear us talk about, when I first read the essay, I was kind of skeptical about it, but there was this moment in it that transformed the way that I thought about what Amy was saying, and now I can't get the idea of trusting cravings and leaning into cravings out of my head.

Amy subverts the idea that we should pathologise our cravings and invites us to explore how food can be a gateway to satisfying non-food cravings as well. So like how creating someone's favourite dish can help us feel connected to someone we miss, and someone who we're longing. Amy also talks really openly about her own relationship with food and how she experienced an eating disorder as a teen, and how part of that healing now is trying on the word fat and noticing how that feels.

So we'll get to Amy in just a minute, but first of all, a couple of notes. This is your last shout for my Raising Embodied Eater's Workshop on the 21st of February. It's a 90 minute workshop where we're going to be reflecting on your own relationship with food and your body growing up and thinking about how you want to parent your kids around food and around their bodies.

We'll talk about how food rules pressure restriction and trying to micromanage how much and what our kids eat can backfire and harm the relationship with food, and it could also make picky and fussy eating worse. We'll talk about how to support kids innate hunger and fullness cues with flexible structure. We'll think about how to let go of the pressure to feed kids perfectly. We'll talk a lot about embodiment and supporting body autonomy, and also think about ways to respond to food and body shaming comments from family and friends, plus loads and loads more. I'm actually not sure I'm gonna fit it all in. We'll figure it out and there will be some time in the end to ask questions too. So if we don't get to cover absolutely everything we can, you know, answer it in the q and a at the end. And if that sounds good to you, the link to sign up is in the show notes and transcript. Um, it's also on my Instagram bio, so if you're, I don't know, on Instagram, then click click through the link in the bio. It's 15 pounds and the recording will be available for a week after to catch up. You'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters download, which is like a 10 page PDF with loads of helpful things that you can share with family and friends. And, um, like I said, there will be some time at the end to answer your questions, so all the links are in the notes, in the transcript and in my Instagram bio.

And just before we get to Amy, I wanted to ask a quick favour. If you've been enjoying these episodes, then please think about leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. It lets people who are on the fence about listening know that it's worth their time. Just a few sentences would really mean a lot and help us grow the Can I Have Another Snack family. So thank you if you do that. I super appreciate it. It's a really low-key, we low-key way that you can support the podcast and the newsletter without becoming a paid subscriber, if that's not something that's available to you right now.

All right, team, I think you're gonna really love this episode. So let's get to today's guest, poet, and writer Amy Key.

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: Amy, I'd love it if you could share with us who or what you're nourishing right now.

Amy: So, I am nourishing my garden by planting all the bulbs that I did not manage to plant before Christmas, because I had a really bad case of flu. And one of the things that makes me so happy in the spring is seeing all the spring bulbs come up, and I hate, hate, hate winter, so it's kind of like a little present to myself that says the future has hope and bright colours in it.

Um, so I've been doing that and also I've moved some of the plants that were not flourishing in the places I'd originally placed them. I've moved them into the communal spaces of the garden...

Today I’m talking to Dr. Hillary McBride. Hillary is a psychologist, a researcher, and podcaster, with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies, and embodiment. She’s the author of two books - ‘Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are’, and ‘The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Wholeness, Healing and Connection through Embodied Living’. She is on the teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia and hosts the podcast Other People’s Problems. Today, we’re speaking about embodiment, healing from trauma and loads of other really cool things!

Find out more about Hillary’s work here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Order Hillary’s books here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Hillary: We could look at how convenient it is to assume that we are an image and then try to control that image when it causes us to forfeit the information that might say, no, I don't wanna participate in the system, or yes, I am hungry and I wanna eat that food even if it means that my body is not gonna appear the way that so and so expects it to. That the information on the inside is costly to stay connected to in a culture that is asking us to forfeit it, in order to belong in this kind of flattened, disembodied, two-dimensional version of, of being an image.

INTRO

Laura: Hey, and welcome back to Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they are nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Hillary McBride. Hillary is a psychologist, a researcher, and a podcaster with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies and embodiment. She's the author of two books: ‘Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are’, and that was published in 2017 and her latest book, ‘The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Wholeness, Healing and Connection Through Embodied Living’ came out in Fall 2021.

Hillary is on the teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia, and she hosts the podcast, Other People's Problems. Today I'm talking to Hillary about embodiment, healing from trauma, and loads of other really cool things. So stay tuned.

Before we get to our conversation with Hillary, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely reader and listener supported. We don't have sponsors or do adverts or anything like that. I don't make money from affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you anything you don't need. All I ask is that if you value the space and the community that we're building, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Yes, you get perks and bonuses, but more than that, you make this work sustainable and accessible for everyone. It's £5 a month or £50 for the year. And if that's unaffordable for you just now, please email hello@laurathomasphd.co uk with the word ‘Snax’ in the subject line, and we will hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked. You don't need to justify yourself or give any explain.

And don't forget that you can get 20% off of a group subscription with, you know, your book club or your friend group, or your co-workers, or even just your family if you roll like that. You need a minimum of two people. And if someone sort of like say, leaves your book club or your office moves on to a new job, you can swap the subscription for whoever joins instead. I'll drop the link to the group subscriptions in the show notes so you can check that out if you and some pals have been on the fence, then this is a great option and it's go time.

And last thing if you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes in this season, then please head over to iTunes and drop five stars. And I see in my statistics that you're all listening on Apple Podcasts anyway, so while you're over there, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a review. I might even read some of them out on the show. It just really helps more people find these conversations and become part of the Can I Have Another Snack community.

All right, team. Thank you so much for your support. Here's my conversation with Hillary McBride.

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: All right, Hillary, I'd love it if you could start by telling us who or what you are nourishing right now.

Hillary: Well, I am nourishing myself and my toddler, and I am so much more attuned to what that means because, I am breastfeeding and I am always ferociously hungry all the time, and there is something about nourishing and kind of the, the literal transmutation of all the food as it comes into my body, out of my body, into her body, that, uh, shows me how deeply connected those two are, both the nourishing and the being nourished.

Laura: Yeah, I haven't thought about it in that way that, I like that word that you use transmutation, um, and also breastfeeding a toddler I can relate to that. And yeah, just having to be really in tune with yourself, but also to a toddler and their needs.

Hillary: Yes,

Laura: It could be a lot.

Hillary: You know, it can be a lot. It's wonderful. And I feel so privileged to, through motherhood, see and experience that connection of how much my attunement and my self care to my body actually literally supports her to thrive and be well. And there's something about that, even just the way you pose the question that highlights for me, the, the interdependence between us as bodies that I think we sometimes forget when we're just mulling about our days, thinking of ourselves as individuals. There's actually this inherent connection between all of us as bodies, and I think parenthood really, really brings that right up close to your face.

Laura: Mm, yeah. I think a lot about interdependence in parenting. You know, from the perspective that that capitalism keeps us so sort of separate from one another. And prioritizes independence and, you know, trying to parent under late stage capitalism without family an...

Welcome to this week’s episode of Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast. This week is a solo episode. I released one of these back in season 1 of the pod, where I read one of my essays to you. And it seems to be something you all really enjoyed so I’m bringing it back this week by reading probably the most popular essay I’ve published here on my Substack - “The Kids Standing in Clean Eating's Long Shadow”.

I published this essay back in January this year, after seeing one of Ella Mills’ (AKA Deliciously Ella) posts over Halloween. In the post in question, Mills went on the attack about Halloween sweets and candies, labelling them as ‘poisonous’, ‘non-foods’ that are ‘addictive’ and ‘full of shit’. And I really wanted to unpack the judgement and all too familiar moralisation of clean eating that diet culture creates.

No transcript today because the full piece is published here.

And don’t forget, for the month of March you can get 20% off paid subscription to celebrate CIHAS turning 6 months old!

This week on the CIHAS pod, we’re switching things up. I’m joined by Jeanette Thompson Wesson (AKA The Mindset Nutritionist), a fat positive nutritionist who supports people to heal their relationship with food and their body. Jeanette and I will be answering some listener questions, and you lot really came through and asked some great questions, so let’s get into it!

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Jeanette’s work here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

And I think that's where fat liberation really can come in because, you know, everyone's trying to carve out their own space for them. Whereas actually body liberation and, and fat liberation is all about widening that lens to other people. We are not just trying to carve out the space for ourselves individually.

We're trying to carve out spaces and take up space in a way that honors other people's space that they're taking up as well and uplifting the bodies that are the most marginalized and going, okay, these are the people who need this space and we want them to have this space. They deserve unconditionally to have this space as well.

INTRO

Laura: Hey, and welcome back to Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an Anti Diet registered nutritionist, an author of the Can I Have Another snack newsletter. Just a very quick reminder before we get to today's episode that for the month of March I'm running a sale on Can I Have Another Snack paid subscribers to celebrate our half birthday.

If you sign up now, you get 20% off, either a monthly or annual subscription. This is a really good deal and I won't be offering it again this year. So head to laurathomas.substack.com to sign up. You get to join in our weekly community discussion threads plus bonus podcast episodes, twice monthly essays, including my Dear Laura column, and more importantly, you're helping making this work possible. And if for any reason you can't afford a subscription right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and put the word “snax” in the header and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription. No questions asked. 

So today I am joined by the wonderful Jeanette Thompson Wesson, and we are gonna be answering listener questions that you've sent in, and there are some really great questions, but if you don't already know Jeanette, she is a fat positive nutritionist who supports people to heal their relationship with food and their body.

And if you want to know more about Jeanette, then I really recommend listening to the episode of Don't Salt My Game that we did together last summer, I'll link to it in the show notes. So go check that out. And how this is gonna work is that we're gonna take it in turns to ask questions and then kind of bounce off of each other to come up with answers.

All right, Jeanette, are you ready?

Jeanette: I am ready. Should we get into it?

Laura: Let's do it. 

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: So you're gonna start off with the first question and yeah, let's see where it goes.

Jeanette: So here is your first question from Ger. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the connection between diet mentality and gut problems with constipation.

Laura: Okay, so Janette and I just had a little back and forth about what exactly this question was getting at, because I think what they're asking is if there is a physiological response in terms of our digestion based on the way we think about food and our relationship with food.

Jeanette: Yeah.

Laura: And so I think that's my understanding of the question, but just in case, and maybe wanna take a step back and think about what happens.

To our gastrointestinal tract when we go on a diet, right? So whether it is, you know, your run of the mill, everyday diet, like a Slimming World or Weight Watchers or whatever, or whether it's, you know, more severe disordered eating or an eating disorder, basically the same thing happens in all of those cases.

It's just the degree to which it happens gets more intense, gets worse, the more severe the problems around eating are. So what we could expect to happen is because the total amount of energy available to the body is not enough to support all its basic functioning. A lot of those basic processes like menstruation, like digestion, all of these things that are considered inverted commas non-essential, they slow down so that there's enough energy to divert towards essential functions like primarily your brain. Right? So what happens in our digestive tract is that we have, Jeanette's gonna love how nerdy I'm gonna get, we have what's called delayed gastric emptying. So the contents of our stomach literally emptying, slows down. It's sometimes called, when it gets really severe, it's called gastroparesis, where it's almost like this partial paralysis of the stomach so that contents don't, from the stomach, don't get properly turned around in the stomach.

And then when the, and then it's the release into our small, our small intestine is a lot slower. So you get, you have this feeling of fullness for a lot longer after eating a meal. And you might also fill up relatively quickly or feel, feel full quite quickly after eating. What happens in our guts, so in our small, in our small intestine primarily is we have slowed peristalsis.

So peristalsis is the action of, um, the muscles along our gastrointestinal tract contracting and pushing food through our guts, right? And basically because there's less, there's less energy available to the body, that process slows down.

That's why you get constipated or you might get mixed i b s type symptoms where you alternate between constipation and diarrhea. So that is effectively what is going on in your gastrointestinal tract when you restrict. And it's also why we say a lot in eating disorder recovery and, and when we're working with people with disorder eating, is that the best way to heal your gut is not through going on some sort of low FODMAP diet or some leaky gut protocol or whatever other bullshit is out there, is it's actually having regular, consistent, adequate nutrition and nourishing your body. That's what heals any gut related issues. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't in some cases where people maybe have intolerances or other, you know, have to be mindful of, of what they're eating for other medical reasons, but that broadly speaking, that unless we have enough energy on board and we're eating regularly, then it just sends our guts kind of haywire.

Right. Would you have anything to add to that, Jeanette?

Jeanette: I mean, have a lot of clients who have experienced that and also I have a lot...

Today I'm talking with Dr. Scott Griffiths. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the Physical Appearance Research Team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers and health professionals who investigate body image, appearance related stigmas and discrimination, appearance enhancing substances, appearance enhancement and appearance related psychological disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.

I wanted to talk to Scott about the phenomenon of muscle dysmorphia, a disorder that sits somewhere between a body dysmorphic disorder and an eating disorder that tends to impact cis boys and men. It's sometimes characterised as the male anorexia. Of course cis boys and men get anorexia too, but muscle dysmorphia is a bit different. It's sometimes known as Bigorexia. It's when an individual doesn't believe that they're big enough or sufficiently muscular to the point that they devote their lives to gains and progress in the gym. They might follow extremely strict diets which prioritise protein and cut out a lot of carbohydrates, and in some cases men can turn to using anabolic steroids, which have some really serious long-term effects for both physical and mental health as you'll hear us talking about. A lot of Scott's research is about the ways that social media, and particularly TikTok feeds people who are vulnerable to eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia, more and more content that upholds unrealistic body and image based ideals, and actually fuels eating disorders.

It's really interesting research to hear about, but as a parent and as someone who works with eating disorders, it's really terrifying.

Find out more about Scott’s work here.

Follow his work on Twitter here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Scott: When you're on your feed and TikTok is delivering videos for you to consume, all of the reference points you are getting from content that it’s popular and influential and that people are responding to it. It's so divorced from reality that you've got a greater pool of people comparing and feeling poorly about themselves and now investing in the general necessity of looking better.

INTRO

Laura: Hey, and welcome to Can I Have Another Snack? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet, registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. We're having conversations about how we nourish ourselves and our kids in all senses of the word in the hellscape that is diet culture.

Today I'm talking with Dr. Scott Griffiths. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the Physical Appearance Research Team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers and health professionals who investigate body image, appearance related stigmas and discrimination, appearance enhancing substances, appearance enhancement and appearance related psychological disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.

I wanted to talk to Scott about the phenomenon of muscle dysmorphia, a disorder that sits somewhere between a body dysmorphic disorder and an eating disorder that tends to impact cis boys and men. It's sometimes characterized as the male anorexia, which of course cis boys and men get anorexia too. But muscle dysmorphia is a bit different. It's sometimes known as bigorexia. It's when an individual doesn't believe that they're big enough or sufficiently muscular to the point that they devote their lives to gains and progress in the gym. They might follow extremely strict diets which prioritize protein and cut out a lot of carbohydrates. And in some cases men can turn to using anabolic steroids, which have some really serious long-term effects for both physical and mental health as you'll hear us talking about. A lot of Scott's research is about the ways that social media, and particularly TikTok feeds people who are vulnerable to eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia, more and more content that upholds unrealistic body and image based ideals and actually fuels eating disorders.

It's really interesting research to hear about, but as a parent and as someone who works with eating disorders, it's. Really terrifying. So you'll notice that this episode has a slightly different vibe to some of the other episodes this season. I'm asking Scott more about his research on muscle dysmorphia rather than his, you know, personal story. And I'm curious to hear what you think of this episode and get some feedback from you as to whether you'd like more interviews with academics, researchers and practitioners with a particular kind of expertise or on a particular topic like this, in addition to hearing people's lived experience. So if you want, you can drop me a comment over on Substack underneath this episode, um, which you can find at laurathomas.substack.com.

And while I have you here, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely listener and reader supported, but in order to be able to cover the costs of admin and people and pay guests and contributors. A lot of my time is devoted to other work outside of the newsletter. That means I have less time to bring deeply researched essays as well as thoughtful interviews here on the podcast. I'd love to be able to devote most of my time to the work and the community that we're building here, but that means I need a lot more of you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. I also know that that's a big ask right now. So for the month of March, I'm running a one off spring sale on Can I Have another Snack subscriptions. They are 20% off, so for this month only, if you subscribe, you'll pay four pounds a month or 40 pounds for the year instead of five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, which is a bargain. I'm not going to be running this good a deal for the rest of the year, so now is the time to cash in. If you've been sitting on the fence it's time to make a move. I'll put a subscription link in the show notes.

You can also gift a subscription to a friend or family member or a coworker and get that same deal. And remember that if you want to sign up with some pals or like your NCT group from five years ago, you always get 20% off of group subscriptions. So I will also link to group subscriptions in the show notes.

Okay, team, I appreciate your support and hopefully one day we can make this work more sustainable, so I can give up my side hustles. Thank you so much for being here. Here is my interview with Scott Griffiths.

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: All right...

Hey Team and welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast. We’ve been on hiatus but we’re back with a new fortnightly pod. Today I’m talking to Dr. Asher Larmie, AKA The Fat Doctor. Asher is a transgender, non-binary GP who uses they/them pronouns. They are a fat activist and founder of the #NoWeigh campaign. Asher joined me on the Don’t Salt My Game Podcast back in May last year, and we had such a great conversation that I just had to have them back for the CIHAS pod.

This episode is in response to the news that the NHS/NICE in the UK are contemplating offering weight-loss injectables to kids. These drugs have already been approved in the US (which I discuss here) - it was only a matter of time before we started talking about it here too. In this episode, we talk about the evidence behind semaglutide, or lack thereof, potential side effects and unintended consequences, and of course, we talk about the company behind this drug, Novo Nordisk, who are set to make bank off of fat kids. So yeah, the first episode back is kind of a bummer - but I wanted to make sure we had a good grasp of the science before the media shitstorm kicks off.

We also have a new podcast editor - the lovely from - welcome Lucy! (see if you can find the Avery Easter eggs she planted in the new episode format).

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Asher’s work here.

Follow their work on Instagram here and Twitter here.

Listen to The Fat Doctor Podcast here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Sign up to my upcoming webinar with - ‘Substack for Nutrition Professionals: Launching & Growing Your Email Newsletter’.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Asher Larmie: We had 180 teenagers for a year, and that's it. It's not enough time to understand what is going to happen to that teenager long term. We need studies that have looked back after 20 years. We need to know what's gonna happen to these kids when they become adults, when they become older adults, but not the first year. It's so dangerous. These drugs haven't existed for long enough. We've never used them in children before. It's terrifying to me. Absolutely terrifying.

Laura Thomas: Hey, welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast where we talk about food, bodies and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas. I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Asher Larmie. Asher, who uses they/them pronouns, is a transgender non-binary GP and fat activist who is campaigning for an end to medical weight stigma.

They're the founder of the #NoWeigh campaign and they have over 20 years of medical experience and have been fat for even longer than that

Laura Thomas: As the self-styled Fat Doctor, Asher started a blog in June 2020. They now also host a successful podcast and run a number of training courses, as well as monthly webinars for people who are interested in learning about weight inclusivity.

Today I'm gonna be talking to Asher about the news that came out of the UK that the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, or NICE, is considering approving the weight loss injectable Semaglutide for kids. Asher is here to explain to us why this is catastrophic for kids' sense of safety in their bodies and their wellbeing.

We talk about the evidence behind Semaglutide, or I suppose the lack thereof, the potential side effects and unintended consequences. And of course, we talk about the company behind this drug, Novo Nordisk, who are set to make bank off of fat kids.

Just before we get to Asher though, I wanna tell you real quick about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the, Can I Have Another Snack newsletter community, whole universe.

Now, I know we're not used to having to pay for content on the internet, and why would you pay for something where 85% of the content is free? Well, that's a great question. I'd love to answer it for you. Well, because without paying supporters, this work just wouldn't be possible. As well as supporting me in the time it takes to research, interview contributors and write articles, your support goes towards paying guests for their time and their labour, as well as a podcast and newsletter editor. You also help keep this space ad and sponsor free so I don't have to sell out to advertisers or exploit my kid for freebies. Plus keeping the community closed to paying subscribers only means that we keep the trolls and the fatphobes out.

I recently asked the CIHAS community why they support the newsletter, and this is what they had to say:

“I am a mum of one, fairly adventurous, self-proclaimed vegetarian and one theoretical omnivore. The latter survives almost exclusively on added sugar and butter, but mostly sugar. I consumed all the picky eating advice, some of it really well-meaning, and pretty mellow. But by seven years in, I was more frustrated, confused, and full of self-doubt than ever. Enter CIHAS. The no-nonsense, cut through the bullshit, science-backed content is exceptional. The content about sugar is especially helpful to me, and the anti diet lens is an anecdote to my extremely anti-fat slash diet-culture conditioning. And as an American, the British references are just an added bonus to say your work is actively changing. My life is not an understatement. Thank you.”

Well, thank you to the reader who shared that lovely testimonial, and if that hasn't inspired you to become a paid subscriber, I don't know what will. It's just a fiver a month or £50 for the entire year, and you get loads of cool perks, as well as just my undying gratitude for supporting my work.

Head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe now. All right, team. Over to Asher. 

Laura Thomas: So Asher, last month, the news broke that the Department of Health have recently asked the Medical Watchdog NICE. Which stands for the National Institute of Clinical Excellence to review the so-called benefits of using weight loss injectables for kids aged between 12 and 17 years old. Specifically, they're looking at the drug Semaglutide. Which has been in the news a lot recently, which I'm sure we'll get to. But I wondered if we could start by talking about what exactly Semaglutide is, how it work...

Today, I’m speaking with Zoë Bisbing - mother of three and licensed psychotherapist at Body Positive Therapy NYC, and creator of Body Positive Home. Zoë works with families of youth struggling with eating disorders, and works to raise awareness about prevention, early detection, and immediate intervention. Zoë is also the host of The Full Bloom Podcast.

Today we’re talking about how to build a Body-Positive Home, and how we can build buffering skills right into the foundation of the homes and schools we nurture our children in.

Find out more about Zoë’s work here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Zoë Bisbing: I do think that if you're like, “Yeah, I totally want to build a body positive home, show me how”, I think you're actually embarking on some micro-activism. Because if you can commit to building a body positive home, you're going to potentially raise a body positive kid who's going to maybe then go out into the world and make the world a more body positive place.

INTRO

Laura Thomas: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast where we talk about food, bodies and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas. I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter.

Today I'm talking to Zoë Bisbing. Zoë, who uses she/her pronouns, is a licensed psychotherapist, mother of three and creator of Body Positive Home, a learning and healing hub for humans who want to nurture a more embodied and inclusive next generation. Zoë directs a group therapy practice in New York City, where she and her team treat folks across the age, gender and disordered eating spectrum. A certified family based treatment practitioner, Zoë's work with families of youth struggling with eating disorders fuels her passion to raise awareness about prevention, early detection, and immediate intervention for eating disorders. Today, we're going to be talking about how to build a body positive home, and this is Zoë’s idea of how we can build buffering skills right into the foundations of the homes and schools that we nurture our children in. 

But first, I'd love to tell you about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter and whole universe. And of course, there are cool perks like being able to comment on posts, our Thursday threads, Snacky Bits, and exclusive posts on intuitive eating, weight-inclusive health, and responsive feeding. But more than all of that, being reader and listener supported means that I can better control who comes into the space. In other words, we keep the trolls and the fatphobes out. And if they do sneak in, at least it's cost them and I can still boot them out. Having control over who comes into the space is essential for creating a safe nurturing space away from diet culture, where we can discuss the both and of why it's hard to have a body and how we deserve to feel safe in them, or why it's okay for your kids to eat sweets, without the food police breathing down our neck. 

So if you're still not convinced, here's a recent testimonial from someone in the CIHAS community: 

“I wish I had access to the advice and information you shared when my kids were little, but it's still valuable now they're nearly adults for a couple of reasons, at least. Firstly, having only been diagnosed as autistic in middle age, I have had a complicated relationship with food for most of my life. From childhood fussy eating through stigma over my higher body weight, and internalised fat phobia, to temporary success with dieting, followed by the inevitable return to my previous size. Your writing has helped me to cast off many of my own hang ups about food, weight and health, making me a better role model for my kids. Secondly, your advice helps me to support and advise my kids with their own food, health and body image issues and to advocate for them to my family and friends. I believe in showing my appreciation for people who provide me with help and support at least by saying thank you and, where possible, with feedback and or financially. I can't financially support everyone I'd like to all of the time, but I do what I can when I can. Thank you for all you do, Laura.”

Well, thank you for that lovely review. And I guess the question is, what are you waiting for? You can sign up today at laurathomas.substack.com or find the link in your show notes. It's £5 a month or £50 for the year. And if you can't stretch that right now just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with the word ‘Snacks’ in the subject line and we will hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked and no need to explain yourself. Alright team, here's Zoë

MAIN EPISODE

Zoë Bisbing: I am Zoe Bisbing. I'm a licensed clinical social worker and a licensed psychotherapist here in New York City. I run a group therapy practice, that's sort of, I guess my day job, a practice called Body Positive Therapy NYC. And I have a group of really wonderful clinicians that work there with me and we, we treat folks across the age and gender spectrum struggling with all kinds of disordered eating, eating disorders.

And I do specialise in working with children and adolescents and their families with eating disorders, which actually is sort of how I got into my other.

Laura Thomas: Your side hustle!

Zoë Bisbing: My side hustle, yeah. My side hustle / baby / passion project, which is now called Body Positive Home, once was the Full Bloom Project, but it's sort of evolved into Body Positive Home.

That work, I guess you could call it, I'd be curious to hear what you call it, but I think of it as advocacy, education and most importantly, prevention. It's my best attempt at disordered eating prevention, body image disturbance prevention, eating disorder prevention as far as we can, cos of course we can't entirely prevent eating disorders, but all of the work, my social media presence and speaking and all of it, it, it comes from a deep concern that I have for all of us. 

Laura Thomas: Just as you were speaking there, I would add activism into the mix, and this may be foreshadowing a little bit, but definitely there's, there's a thread of activism there and body politics, which I know we're gonna come back to in a minute. We're gonna get into what we need to run a body positive home in just a second. But I would love it if you could tell me…why do we need this? Like, you kind of alluded to it a little bit there, but maybe ground that in a bit more context for us.

Zoë Bisbing: As a human being that lives in th...

In this episode of the Can I Have Another Snack? pod, I’m speaking to Kevin Jarvis about Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, or ARFID - a feeding difference that presents differently for different folks but might be characterised by a relatively limited number of preferred foods, sensory processing differences, and fear of eating. It also often intersects with OCD, Autism and other divergent neurotypes. Today we’re discussing the things Kevin wished more caregivers knew about ARFID. Feeding differences are so often framed as ‘picky’ or ‘fussy’ eating and we are handed strategies to ‘fix’ the so-called problems. These feeding therapies — rooted in the medical model of health — can often be traumatic and lead to masking. But what if we viewed feeding differences through the lens of acceptance? How might we be able to better support and accomadate feeding differences? Kevin shares some insight based on their own lived experience - I hope it helps parents and carers of kids with ARFID better understand their experiences.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We touch on some distressing experiences around ED treatment and trauma in this episode, so please look after yourself and skip this episode if you’re not feeling up to it.

Follow Kevin’s work on Instagram here.

Join Kevin’s ARFID Peer Support Space on Facebook here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Kevin Jarvis: And I got a dietician and within 20 minutes of talking to her, she's like, have you ever heard of ARFID? I was like, no. So we like went on a deep dive about that, what that was. I was like, holy shit, like there's a name for something i've been experiencing my whole fucking life. What?

INTRO

Laura Thomas: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Kevin Jarvis. Kevin, who uses they/them pronouns, is a mad, disabled, and queer artist from so-called Western Massachusetts, located on the Pocomtuc People's Land.

Kevin's art and activism speaks to their lived experience with mental health in an unfiltered way. They exhibit a passionate effort towards making the world a more accessible place for everyone, and their lifelong struggle with things like ARFID, chronic illness, and mental illness fuels this passion. When they're not painting, sculpting, making, or building something, they enjoy being at the Nubble Lighthouse, hanging with their cats, Tucker and Potato, which is potentially the best name I've ever heard for a cat, cooking, and getting lost in the woods. 

So I asked Kevin to come onto the podcast to speak about Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, or ARFID. A lot of you have been asking me for more content around feeding neurodivergent kids, and there's a huge overlap between ARFID and various sensory sensitivities and divergent neurotypes. So I wanted to speak to someone who had some lived experience to talk about the things that they wished more caregivers knew about this feeding difference. We touch on some distressing experiences around eating disorder treatment and trauma so please look after yourself and skip this episode if you're not feeling up to it. 

Before we get to Kevin, I want to remind you that the Can I Have Another Snack? universe is entirely listener and reader supported. If you get something out of the work we do here, please consider supporting us by becoming a paid subscriber.

It's £5 a month or £50 for the year, and as well as getting you loads of cool perks, you help guarantee the sustainability of the newsletter and the podcast. You have a say in the work that we do here, and you help ensure I can keep delivering deeply researched pieces that provide a diet culture-free take on hot nutrition topics like ultra processed foods, the Zoe app and a deep dive on helping kids have a good relationship with sugar. All of those you can find at laurathomas.substack.com and I'll link to them in the show transcript as well so you can find them. 

And if you're not totally sold yet, then maybe this lovely little review that I got recently will help convince you. So this reader wrote, 

“I feel so lucky that I found your work around the same time I started feeding my kid real, in inverted commas, food. They mean solid foods! It saved me so much angst and has allowed me to relax and really enjoy seeing him explore eating. Your essay on sugar especially was a game changer. I'm sure it won't always be plain sailing, but I feel much more prepared to ride the waves of his changing appetite and taste as he grows, accepting them as a feature and not a bug. So hopefully he can have a much more relaxed relationship to food than I had for a long time. And I pay my £5 a month because I so value the work you put into your writing and think it's worth paying for. There's loads of free advice out there, but I never really know what I can trust. This is such a safe haven.”

So thank you for that really lovely review. And yeah, it's £5 a month or £50 for the year. You can sign up at laurathomas.substack.com or check out the show notes for this episode for all the links. And if you can't stretch to a paid subscription right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk for a comp subscription, no questions asked, and just put the word ‘Snacks’ in the subject line. And those comp subscriptions are also made possible by supporting subscribers. So thank you if you are a fully paid up member of the community. 

Alright team, here's Kevin.

MAIN EPISODE

Laura Thomas: Hey, Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. I was wondering if we could start by saying a little bit about yourself and the work that you do.

Kevin Jarvis: Yeah, so I'm Kevin. I'm from Western Massachusetts. I use they/them pronouns. Yeah, I'm just like a disabled queer content creator and chef and peer mentor. I do a lot of work around eating disorders in the trans community and like neurodiversity and eating disorders. More specifically talking a lot about ARFID. And what that is and what it means to be a fidder, which is a term I coined for people with ARFID. People have enjoyed it. So yeah, just like what it's like being a fidder and like how the world, and providers specifically, can do better. 

Yeah, and i'm also a cat dad which feels important to always add.. Yeah, like I also have a wonderful fiancé but also…cat dad.

Laura Thomas: I love that's where you derive your identity. And I also love that you were the person that coined the term fidder, I think, for ...

Today, I’m joined by Dr. Colleen Reichmann - licensed clinical psychologist and eating disorder specialist with lived experience with anorexia, founder of Wildflower Therapy, and author of The Inside Scoop on Eating Disorder Recovery: Advice From Two Therapists Who Have Been There. Colleen is also an advocate for intersectional feminism, body liberation, and HAES, and she's also a passionate advocate for maternal mental health, and an IVF mom times two.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this episode, Colleen and I talk about a lot of pretty difficult themes. She discusses her journey to parenthood through IVF and through multiple miscarriages. We talk about grief, ambiguous loss, and being really angry and mad at your body and why it's important to allow all of that to be there.

We talk about these topics as sensitively as we can, but if it's not for you right now, then just give this one a miss. There are loads more episodes that you can go back and listen to and just come and join us in the next episode.

Find out more about Colleen’s work here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Subscribe to her Substack here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Colleen Reichmann: But I felt like my body did let me down.

I wanted those babies. Like, so much, and it didn't do what I wanted it to do. I can't imagine anything more important in my life than that, and it let me down, like, repeatedly. I had such rage. 

Like, I am at this point, just like any relationship we have with like a spouse, for example, your points where you're going to be just so angry and need space from your spouse or your partner. And that's how I felt during that period.  I didn't want to be, like, pushed to, like, reunite at that time, I was like, no, I want to sleep in different bedrooms.

INTRO

Laura Thomas: Hey, and welcome to Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Colleen Reichmann.

Colleen is a licensed clinical psychologist practicing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She works at her group practice, Wildflower Therapy. She has lived experience with anorexia and this experience sparked her passion for spreading knowledge and awareness that recovery is possible. She is now an eating disorder specialist and has worked at various treatment facilities as well as authored a book, The Inside Scoop on Eating Disorder Recovery, advised from two therapists who have been there.

She's an advocate for intersectional feminism, body liberation, and health at every size, and she's also a passionate advocate for maternal mental health, and an IVF mom times two. So in this episode, Colleen and I talk about a lot of pretty difficult themes. She discusses her journey to parenthood through IVF and through multiple miscarriages.

We talk about grief, ambiguous loss, and being really angry and mad at your body and why it's important to allow all of that to be there. We talk about these topics as sensitively as we can, but if it's not for you right now, then just give this one a miss. There are loads more episodes that you can go back and listen to and just come and join us in the next episode.

We're also going to be talking about raising embodied kiddos towards the end of the episode, so you can also just skip forward and listen to that part. And Colleen shares some of her really great advice as a mother and an eating disorder specialist psychologist about how we can help protect our kids’ embodiment.

But before we get to Colleen, I really wanted to remind you that the Can I Have Another Snack? universe is entirely listener and reader supported. If you get something out of the work that we do here, please help support us by becoming a paid subscriber. It's £5 a month or £50 for the year and as well as getting you loads of cool perks, you help guarantee the sustainability of this newsletter and have a say in the work that we do here as well as ensure that I can keep delivering deeply researched pieces that provide a diet culture-free take on hot nutrition topics like ultra processed foods, the Zoe app and a deep dive on helping kids have a good relationship with sugar.. 

All of those articles I've already written and you can read at laurathomas.substack.com. And if you're not yet totally convinced, then maybe this lovely review that I got recently will help. So this reader and listener wrote: 

“I want to support the work you're doing as I think it's really important and I believe that you should be paid for your work.” I agree! “I value the model of subscriber direct support rather than ad revenue. I really like all your comments and interviews on the podcast about internalised capitalism and how it affects our views of things without us even realising. Thank you for spending your valuable time and skills to do all this research and writing it up.

I would love to see you talking about all of this in mainstream newspapers, TVs, magazines, and other media. It's such an important topic and I really hope you get more and more moment  for your work. Also on a personal note, you are helping me change my children's lives for the better by educating me about all of this. Really appreciate all that you're doing.” 

Such a kind review, thank you to the person who emailed that in, you know who you are. So yeah, it's £5 a month, or £50 for the year, and you can sign up at laurathomas.substack.com. Or check out the show notes for this episode. And if you can't stretch to a paid subscription right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk for a comp subscription. No questions asked, just put ‘Snacks’ in the subject line. 

All right gang, here's Colleen.

MAIN EPISODE

Colleen, can you start by letting everyone know a little bit about you and the work that you do?

Colleen Reichmann: Sure. So my name is Dr. C...

Alright team, after a little hiatus from the CIHAS pod for a month, we’re coming back hard with Molly Forbes. Molly joined me back in May 2022 on the Don’t Salt My Game pod where we discussed how to stomp out diet culture in schools, and I’m so excited to have her join us in today’s episode.

This time around, we discuss what the NCMP is, what it looks like in different schools, why you might want to opt your kid out, how you even go about doing that, and what you can do if you're worried about your child feeling left out if they're the ones who are left in the classroom while everyone else goes to get weighed.

Find out more about Molly’s work here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Read more about the history of and evidence behind the NCMP here:

Here’s the transcript in full:

INTRO:

Laura Thomas: Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk about appetite, bodies and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Molly Forbes.

Molly is a journalist, campaigner and non profit founder. She's the author of the book Body Happy Kids: How to Help Children and Teens Love the Skin They're In and she's the founding director of the Body Happy Organisation CIC a social enterprise dedicated to promoting positive body image in children. I asked Molly to come on during the back to school season because we need to talk about the National Weight Measurement Programme, or the NCMP.

This is the programme where children in England have their height and weight taken in schools at age 4-5, so in reception and then again in year six, which is ages 10 or 11. My understanding is that this happens in various forms throughout the UK. So in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland too. Although let me know in the comments how it's different for you or, you know, what the similarities are if you're in one of those countries. 

The UK government have taken the position that this is an innocuous practice. But, as I discussed with Molly, this is not reflected in the body image research. The programme is associated with poorer body image, which in turn is linked to disordered eating, body preoccupation, and lower overall sense of well being.

So Molly and I, in this episode, go on to discuss what the NCMP is, what it looks like in different schools, why you might want to opt your kid out, how you even go about doing that, and what you can do if you're worried about your child feeling left out if they're the ones who are left in the classroom while everyone else goes to get weighed.

I really hope you will share this episode with your school WhatsApp group, your friend group, with the teachers in your school, and help end the tyranny of the NCMP. You can also share Body Happy Org and Any Body UK's Informed Decision Making Pack and my writing on the NCMP, all of which I'll link to in the show notes for you.

All right, before we get to Molly, I want to tell you real quick about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter and community. 

Now, I know we're not used to having to pay for content on the internet, and why would you pay for something where 85% of the content is free? Well, that's a great question. I'd love to answer it for you. Well, because without paying supporters, this work just wouldn't be possible. As well as supporting me in the time it takes to research, interview contributors and write articles, your support goes towards paying guests for their time and their labour, as well as a podcast and newsletter editor. You also help keep this space ad and sponsor free so I don't have to sell out to advertisers or exploit my kid for freebies. Plus keeping the community closed to paying subscribers only means that we keep the trolls and the fatphobes out.

I recently asked the CIHAS community why they support the newsletter, and this is what they had to say:

“I am a mum of one, fairly adventurous, self-proclaimed vegetarian and one theoretical omnivore. The latter survives almost exclusively on added sugar and butter, but mostly sugar. I consumed all the picky eating advice, some of it really well-meaning, and pretty mellow. But by seven years in, I was more frustrated, confused, and full of self-doubt than ever. Enter CIHAS. The no-nonsense, cut through the bullshit, science-backed content is exceptional. The content about sugar is especially helpful to me, and the anti diet lens is an anecdote to my extremely anti-fat slash diet-culture conditioning. And as an American, the British references are just an added bonus to say your work is actively changing. My life is not an understatement. Thank you.”

Well, thank you to the reader who shared that lovely testimonial, and if that hasn't inspired you to become a paid subscriber, I don't know what will. It's just a fiver a month or £50 for the entire year, and you get loads of cool perks, as well as just my undying gratitude for supporting my work.

Head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe now.

 All right team, here's Molly.

MAIN EPISODE:

Laura Thomas: Hey Molly, can you start by telling us a bit about you and the work that you do? 

Molly Forbes: Yeah. So I run an organisation called the Body Happy Organisation. We're a CIC, so a Community Interest Company, or a social enterprise. Or if you're in the US, you might know that model is like a non profit. And essentially what we're all about is trying to create environments that allow children's body image to thrive.

So we're really looking at prevention and we're looking at how we can create, kind of, culture change in schools and youth clubs and anywhere that children hang out and are to help, kind of, create an environment that just allows kids to just be at peace and friends with their body. And then all the other benefits that come with that, including how they treat other children with bodies that don't look or function like their own.

And I also wrote a book called Body Happy Kids, which is for adults,  teachers, parents…I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not a dietitian. I'm not a psychologist. But I'm a journalist by trade. So I've really interested in that kind of media and culture angle when it comes to this subject. And that kind of informs, I guess, the lens that I come to this through. 

But in our organisation, we do have lots of different people from a range of different disciplines, which I think is also what makes us kind of special because we're not at it just from like a body image researcher lens, for example, or just from a nutritional food lens.

We're looking at it from, like, a range of different perspectives.

Laura Thomas: Yeah, the work that you do is really important. And one sort of thread of the work that you're doing is around the National Child Me...

Today I’m speaking to Sarah Sproule (she/them), a sex educator, an occupational therapist, as well as a mother of three teens. Sarah uses their skills to ensure that every parent and caring adult knows how to build a deeper connection with their growing kids, and believes that no child should ever feel alone and unable to reach out for help with their body, their boundaries, or their needs. Or their knowledge about sexuality.

In this episode, we are talking about ‘sensitive things’ with our kids, plus reclaiming the ‘C word’. We dive into the following topics;

* The ‘invisible influence of normal’

* Showing kids we’re a trusted person to talk to about sensitive things

* Why we don’t want to wait until sex ed classes to start talking about sex

* Teaching kids about body boundaries

* Answering your Qs about: 

* How to explain to kids why you do some things in private?

* 4 year olds asking BIG questions you’re not sure they’re ready for

* 3 year olds who are resistant to challenging gender stereotypes

* How to support your child when someone is asking invasive questions

* Plus Sarah shares the unknown history of the C word!

Find out more about Sarah’s work here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Sarah Sproule: I drew analogies between talking about sensitive things and other parts of parenting. So, I don't know a single other parent who waited for their child to ask them for a stem of broccoli before they gave it to them. Right? And we know that broccoli's really great. I don't know a parent who waited for their child to ask them, Can you please show me how to cross the road? Because I want to stay safe. Like, there are so many things we do, we take initiative for, because we know it's important for the health and safety and joy of our child. 

INTRO

Laura Thomas: Welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we are talking about appetite, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today, I'm talking to Sarah Sproule. Sarah, who uses she/them pronouns, is a sex educator, an occupational therapist, as well as a mother of three teens.

Sarah uses their skills to ensure that every parent and caring adult knows how to build a deeper connection with their growing kids. She believes that no child should ever feel alone and unable to reach out for help with their body, their boundaries, or their needs. Or their knowledge about sexuality.

In this conversation, we talk about what Sarah calls the ‘invisible influence of normal’; all the things, spoken and unspoken, that shape how we think about bodies, sex, pleasure, periods, and more. And we talk about why it's important to approach these conversations with our kids early and in a non-judgmental way that prioritises connection and helps inoculate them against body shame.

We talk about supporting kids to trust their body boundaries and how that can help them use their voice when something doesn't feel right. Plus we answer your questions like how to teach kids that maybe it's best not to touch their penis at the dinner table, without inadvertently shrouding them in shame.

Obviously this is a conversation about sensitive topics to do with sex, and at one point we do mention rape and other forms of violence. We also use the C word quite liberally towards the end, which Sarah and I are comfortable with, but we understand that it may not be for everyone. So all of that is to say, listen at your discretion and take care of yourself. I will say, though, that Sarah is extremely compassionate and thoughtful in how she approaches these topics. So I hope you'll find this to be a safe and nourishing conversation. 

Just before we get to Sarah, I wanted to tell you real quick about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter and community and whole wider universe.

So until the end of September, I'm running a 15% off sale on the cost of annual memberships. So instead of paying £50 a year, you would pay £42.50 and that gets you access to the monthly Dear Laura columns where I answer your questions. It gets you access to the whole CIHAS archive, it gives you commenting privileges, plus weekly discussion threads tackling the big issues like…how clean is your fridge? And who are you dressing for on the school run? It's a really welcoming space where we learn from each other, share with folks who have a similar world view to us, and we have a lot of fun. And of course it's a completely diet, body shame-free space. 

I wanted to quickly share what one CIHAS reader said recently. They shared this review saying:

“Laura's Substack is a lifeline in a world where diet culture and fatphobia is pervasive in all aspects of our lives including how we feed our children. Every time I start to worry about my toddlers eating and that internalised diet culture mentality starts bubbling up, it's Laura's voice telling me that it's all going to be okay. Through her invaluable work on CIHAS, she's genuinely keeping me sane and empowering me to navigate feeding my child and making the right decisions for my family. The paid subscription is more than worth it. Thanks, Laura.” 

Well, thank you for that really sweet review. And like I said, we're running a sale for the rest of September and you can sign up at laurathomas.substack.com and I'll drop the link in the show notes so you can find it really easily. And by becoming a paid subscriber, not only do you get the sweet perks that I mentioned earlier, but more importantly, your contributions help make this work sustainable. 

All right, team, let's get to today's guest. Here's Sarah. 

MAIN EPISODE

Hey, Sarah, can you start by telling us a little bit about you and the work that you do, please? 

Sarah: I support parents and other adults who are raising children to speak about sensitive things. So that's a euphemism for puberty, genitals, babies, growing up, sex, relationships, all that sort of stuff that might seem a little bit like…eeeeh!...when you think about having conversations about that with kids.

And that work is important to me. I'm an occupational therapist, but I do that work because I was one of the kids that would have really benefited from way more open and sort of practical conversations about all that sort of stuff. My mum and dad were missionaries and we grew up in Nigeria for most of my teen...

In today’s CIHAS episode, I’m speaking to online personal trainer and performance nutritionist, Michael Ulloa. Michael is on a mission to make the fitness industry a more welcoming and accepting space for all, which is exactly what we dive into in this ‘sode.

We are unpacking some toxic myths about exercise, Michael spills the beans on his feelings about Joe Wicks, and we discuss what really goes into professional fitness models’ photo shoots. Plus we answer loads of your questions like how to find a more joyful relationship with movement after a lifetime of using it as punishment for eating.

Find out more about Michael’s work here.

Follow his work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter here.

Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

INTRO:

Michael: The way that we're being sold health and fitness just isn't sustainable or achievable in any way and then people blame themselves and feel worse and then therefore they're more likely to spend money on all these other programs repeatedly and it's just a vicious cycle that just doesn't ever end.

Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast, where we talk about appetite, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas. I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter. Today, I'm talking to Michael Ulloa.

Michael is an online personal trainer and performance nutritionist who is on a mission to make the fitness industry a more welcoming and accepting space for all. In today's episode, Michael and I are shooting the shit about the fitness industry, unpacking some toxic myths about exercise, and answering loads of your questions: like how to find a more joyful relationship with movement after a lifetime of using it as punishment for eating.

Some of you have been asking for more episodes on movement and fitness, so I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. We'll get to Michael in just a second, but first, I want to tell you real quick about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter and community.

For just £5 a month, or £50 a year, you get access to the extended CIHAS universe. That means exclusive weekly discussion threads, links and recommendations, you get commenting privileges and access to my monthly Dear Laura column, as well as the whole CIHAS archive and a few other sweet perks, but more than anything, you're supporting independent evidence based nutrition information free from diet culture and anti fatness.

I can't do this work without the help of paying subscribers. So if you get something out of being here, then please consider upgrading your subscription today. And if you're still not convinced, then check out this recent review I received from a reader. 

They said:

"Laura's podcast and newsletter are always thought provoking, filled with care and compassion, and a respite from one size fits all health and nutrition advice."

So if that sounds good to you, then head to laurathomas.substack.com and become a paying subscriber today. 

Alright team, let's get to today's episode, here's Michael. 

MAIN EPISODE:

All right, Michael, I need to know what the deal is. Because you're like one of maybe five PTs who isn't pushing aesthetic or weight loss goals on us.

Has that always been your deal? Or is this more of an evolution for you? 

Michael: Yeah, it's definitely an evolution and it's funny you mentioned that because I get a lot of angry messages from personal trainers that don't think that my approach is right, which is always quite funny to me. I don't know, it's, I definitely, when I first started off in the fitness industry... I've been a personal trainer now for nearly 10 years.

And in terms of personal training, that kind of makes you a bit of a veteran because a lot of trainers are quite short lived on average. When I first started off, I definitely did have your typical, like, mainstream slightly bro approach to fitness and nutrition. And I know most people that maybe work in the kind of space that, like, you operate in, for example, there tends to usually be a reason or a thing that caused them to go down that path.

But I didn't have that at all. It really has just been a really slow evolution of just actually reading the research, working with people on a day to day basis, getting feedback from clients about what is working and what isn't, and then just really tweaking things over a very long period of time.

 I've also had some very honest clients, which have been great too, who kind of really follow my content on social media and they would message me like, oh, that's not very helpful. How about approaching it like this? And i'm always open to feedback, I always want to improve my practice and my messaging and I was always just quite receptive to that and I don't know... 10 years later I now finally feel like i'm working with people in a way that genuinely helps them long term and i'm actually creating content that is useful for people rather than just almost creating content for other personal trainers, which seems to be what a lot of fitness professionals do.

Laura: Tell me about the angry messages. Why are other PTs up in your shit about...? 

Michael: I really don't know. I wish I knew the answer. I think... I guess if you're attacking someone's entire being and their work and their ethos that they've believed in for so many years, then I guess that a lot of people will react to that in quite a negative way.

I really don't understand it at all either. Usually male coaches too, are very angry in the way that I approach social media and some of the names and things I've been called are pretty grim, but I only... I wish I knew the answer to that, but some, for some reason people get very angry in the way that I am approaching fitness and nutrition.

But yeah, I really don't mind. Like I, as I said, I feel like I'm really helping people now and I'm happy to keep championing that message. 

Laura: I mean, I'm just wondering if part of it is because that myth, certain myth of no pain, no gain. And that you need to like, basically punish yourself with exercise in order to achieve a particular body type.

You're saying, actually, we don't need to do that. It's okay if you don't kill yourself with exercise. We shouldn't be weaponising it against ourselves. For me, it speaks to how deeply internalised people's anti fat bias is. You're challenging the fundamental sort of premise that their beliefs are resting on, which is that, you can't be fit and fat.

Or you...yeah, like I said before, that you have to punish yourself with exercise or like that... it's somehow okay to exist in a body that isn't fulfilling this ideal that we have been ...

Today on the podcast I’m joined by Dr. Molly Moffat - A GP who practices medicine from a weight inclusive, neurodiversity affirming lens, celebrating both diversity of bodies and of minds.

In this episode, we are talking about how Molly moved away from recommending diets and weight loss to her patients, towards an anti-diet, weight-inclusive approach, focused on treating individuals with care and compassion. We get into what exactly medical anti-fat bias is and why it's so harmful, and she has some really lovely suggestions for how to talk to patients who come in with the idea that they have to lose weight for medical reasons.

Find out more about Molly’s work here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter here.

Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

INTRO:

Molly: Fat folk don't go and see their doctor when they need to. And you know, I don't need to explain why that is a concern. That is a concern. It means that diagnoses are missed, diagnoses are made late, and it absolutely contributes to stress, mental health, physical health and health inequity in an already marginalised group of people.

Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk all about appetite, bodies and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Molly Moffat. 

Molly is a GP with a special interest in learning disability and autism. She practices medicine from a weight inclusive, neurodiversity affirming lens, celebrating both diversity of bodies and of minds. She's neurodivergent herself and has three children. 

In this episode, Molly and I are talking about how she moved away from recommending diets and weight loss to her patients towards an anti diet, weight inclusive approach, focused on treating individuals with care and compassion. We get into what exactly medical anti-fat bias is and why it's so harmful, and she has some really lovely suggestions for how to talk to patients who come in with the idea that they have to lose weight for medical reasons. I really loved talking to Molly and I think you're going to enjoy this episode.

But before we get to today's conversation, I want to tell you real quick about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter and community. Now, I know we're not used to having to pay for content on the internet. and why would you pay for something where 85% of the content is free anyway?

Well, because without paying supporters, this work just wouldn't be possible. None of the newsletter, not the podcast. As well as supporting me in the time it takes to research, interview contributors, and write articles, your support goes towards paying guests for their time and their labour, as well as a podcast and a newsletter editor, so it's a whole team effort.

You also help me keep the space ad and sponsor free, so I don't have to sell out to advertisers or exploit my kid for freebies. Plus, keeping the community closed to paying subscribers only means that we keep the trolls and the fatphobes out. I recently asked the CIHAS community why they support the newsletter, and this is what one reader had to say:

“I'm a mum of one fairly adventurous, self proclaimed vegetarian and one theoretical omnivore. The latter survives almost exclusively on added sugar and butter, but mostly sugar. I consumed all the picky eating advice, some of it really well meaning and pretty mellow, but by seven years in, I was more frustrated, confused, and full of self doubt than ever.

Enter CIHAS. The no nonsense, cut through the bullshit, science backed content is exceptional. The content about sugar is especially helpful to me, and the anti diet lens is an antidote to my extremely anti fat/diet culture conditioning. And as an American, the British references are just an added bonus. To say your work is actively changing my life is not an understatement. Thank you.”

Well, thank you to the reader who sent that really lovely review. Becoming a paid subscriber is a fiver a month or £50 for the year. And you get loads of cool perks as well as just my undying gratitude for supporting my work. Head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe now. 

All right, team, here's my conversation with Dr. Molly Moffatt. 

MAIN EPISODE:

Hey Molly, can you start by telling us a little bit about you and the work that you do? 

Molly: Sure, yes. So I'm a GP, although I actually only do one day of general practice at the moment. I have a special interest in learning disability and autism. I've been working in that field for a few years, and I've recently started working in paediatrics, doing some neurodevelopmental assessments, and I also do some teaching for medical students. 

The reason I'm here is because I do my very best to practice in a weight inclusive manner, so I'm not worried about fat bodies, but I'm really worried about the way fat bodies are treated, particularly when they're trying to seek healthcare.

Laura: Yeah, that's what you're here to talk about today, but I feel like we could probably have a whole other conversation about neurodivergence and feeding differences and all of that stuff, but I will try and rein myself in because, yeah, like you said, I really wanted to talk to you about how fat bodies are perceived and how they're treated in medical settings.

So I'm wondering if you could kind of take us on a bit of a journey with you. Can you set the scene for us? You're a medic, straight out of training, going into your GP specialisation. At that point, what do you believe to be true about the relationship between weight and health?

Molly: Okay. So I mean, all of my medical school teaching, all of my junior doctor training, and my GP training was absolutely based in this weight normative approach.

So the idea that weight was a marker of health, and that we should be pursuing weight management for our fat patients. And there was never any discussion around where that came from. So, you know, it was just stated as a fact that ‘ob*sity’ came with all of these comorbidities and put people at increased risk of X, Y, and Z.

And, like I say, I never remember – and I'm really confident it didn't happen – any discussion around where the evidence behind those statements came from, and the fact that actually...it was really complex and that maybe there were some other factors at play that cause that association between body size and certain diseases.

And I also never remember any conversation about weight stigma and the impact that that can have on people's health.

Laura: Okay. Well, there's so much that I could kind of, like, tease out of what you just said there, but I think the sort of headline for me is just how this information was presented to you as complete certainty. I think if I'm kind of reading between the lines, or what I've even learned in my own training,...

Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast. I have been so excited to share this week’s episode with you. Our guest today is Kirstie Beaven from Sonshine magazine - a publication dedicated to raising boys for a more equal world. Kirstie and I talk about how seemingly innocuous things like dinosaur t-shirts and shark pants send a message to our kids about who they can and can’t be, how they should expect to be treated, and how they should treat others. 

Kirstie gives us a fascinating history lesson on how kids’ clothes became gendered (spoiler, colonialism and capitalism have a lot to do with it) and why these have massive repercussions for gender equality. We also talk about why Kirstie is low-key obsessed with pants (the underwear kind), and why we can’t just empower girls in a vacuum; we also need to be teaching boys emotional literacy and allowing them to have an identity outside of the ‘big boy’, or the sporty one. 

Just a heads up that we talk about some distressing statistics around sexual harassment, suicide, and violence towards women and girls, but not in explicit detail.

This is without a doubt one of my favourite episodes we’ve done on the CIHAS pod - if you’ve never listened before then this is a great place to start, even if you don’t have kids. 

Don’t forget to leave a review in your podcast player if you enjoy this episode - or let me know what you think in the comments below.

Find out more about Kirstie’s work here.

Follow her on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter here.

Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

INTRO

Kirstie: That's one of the things I really want to do, is just gently point out the things that we take for granted that we say are normal or natural, but they're not. They're totally constructed. Many of the things that we just take for…oh yeah, pink and blue. Pink is a girls’ colour, blue is a boys’ colour. We think of that as completely normal and it's totally made up and it's so recent.

Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk about appetite, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today I'm talking to Kirstie Beavan.

Kirstie is the founder and editor of Sonshine Magazine, raising boys for a more equal world. Sonshine is a print and digital quarterly, as well as a social profile for parents who want to change the way we talk to and about our sons, to create a better society for all children.

I've been so excited to share this episode. We recorded it a while back and I'm really glad that you're able to finally listen to it. It's such a great discussion about gender inequality and why seemingly innocuous things like how we dress our kids have really long term implications for their emotional development and the roles that they learn to occupy in society. Kirstie is a wealth of knowledge about the gendered history of kids clothing, which you won't be surprised to hear is entirely rooted in capitalism, rather than any real biological or physical differences between sexes. 

I can't wait for you to hear this conversation, and if you don't already, you need to get your hands on a copy of Sonshine Magazine, which is available in print and digitally. I'll link to it in the show notes so you can order yours. It would make a really lovely holiday gift for your co-parent or some other parents that you have in your life, maybe even for yourself. 

But before we get to today's episode, I'd love to tell you all about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter. And of course there are cool perks like being able to comment on posts, our Thursday threads, Snacky Bits, and exclusive posts on intuitive eating, weight inclusive health, and responsive feeding. But more than all of that, being reader and listener supported means I can better control who comes into this space. In other words, we can keep the trolls and the fatphobes out. And if they do sneak in, at least they've had to pay for the privilege, and I can still boot them out. 

Having control over who comes into the space is essential for creating a safe, nurturing space away from diet culture where we can discuss difficult topics like how we deal with diet-y friends, gender division of labour, and body shame. All the way through to more light hearted stuff like the weird shit that mummy influencers say. 

If you're still not convinced, then here's a recent testimonial from someone in the CIHAS community. So they wrote:

“I wish I had access to the advice and information you share when my kids were little, but it's still valuable now that they're nearly adults for a couple of reasons at least. 

Firstly, having only been diagnosed as autistic in middle age, I have had a complicated relationship with food for most of my life. From childhood fussy eating, through stigma over my higher body weight and internalised fat phobia, to temporary success with dieting, followed by the inevitable return to my previous size. Your writing has helped me cast off many of my own hang ups about food, weight, and health, making me a better role model for my kids. 

Secondly, your advice helps me to support and advise my kids with their own food, health, and body image issues, and to advocate for them to family and friends. I believe in showing my appreciation for people who provide me with help and support, at least by saying thank you, and where possible, with feedback and or financially. I can't financially support everyone I'd like to all of the time. But I do what I can when I can. Thank you for all you do Laura.”

So what are you waiting for? You can sign up today at laurathomas.substack.com or find the link in your show notes. It's £5 a month or £5 for the year and if you can't stretch that right now just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with the word “Snacks” in the subject line and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription. No questions asked. You can also gift a subscription to a friend for the holidays to give them unfettered access to the CIHAS community. I can even send you a gift certificate. Just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and we'll hook you up. 

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

All right team, let's get to today's conversation with Kirstie Beavan from Sonshine Magazine. 

MAIN EPISODE

All right, Kirstie, to start with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Kirstie: I'm Kirstie and I run Sonshine Magazine, which is a quarterly print and digital ma...

Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast.

This week I’m talking to specialist diabetes dietitian Erin Phillips about all things insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Erin shares some background on what happens in the body that leads to type 2 diabetes, why ‘prediabetes’ is a dubious diagnosis and the things the keto-bros often leave out this conversation. We talk about why sugar and higher weight aren’t the cause of type 2 diabetes, and how there is so much more we can do to care for diabetes outside of cutting carbs and losing weight, especially if you have a background of an ED or disordered eating.

Lots of you have requested more content around this topic - let me know what questions you still have after listening to this episode!

Find out more about Erin’s work here.

Follow her on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter here.

Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

INTRO

Erin: I think sometimes a diagnosis of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes can be a traumatic event, especially when it's not in the presence of someone caring and that you trust. Or especially if you have a family history of diabetes where you've seen…maybe some scary things. Which I will – now that I said that – I will add that it's, that's not a definite outcome either, those scary things, yeah.

But it can be, that can be really stressful, and that's the opposite of what is helpful for blood sugars.

Laura: Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast where we talk about appetite, bodies and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter.

Today's guest is registered dietitian Erin Phillips. Erin's work is grounded in health at every size and fat positive nutrition. She has an advanced certification as a diabetes specialist and has spent most of her career working with people living with all types of diabetes. She has a private practice that focuses primarily on the intersection of diabetes and eating disorders. She works with people living with diabetes through individual counselling, as well as providing consultation to clinicians looking to be more grounded and confident in supporting their clients and patients with co-occurring diagnoses of diabetes and eating disorders. 

So I've had a lot of feedback from newsletter readers and people who listen to the podcast saying that you'd like more information about weight-inclusive approaches to so-called prediabetes – which we'll get into in a minute – insulin resistance and elevated glucose levels as well as type 2 diabetes. Most of the advice out there centers on carbs. So I was excited to talk to Erin about why these approaches are not only unhelpful for a lot of folks, but how they can be harmful. And why you don't need to get sucked into diet culture to care for yourself. 

In this episode, we discuss why type 2 diabetes isn't caused by too much sugar or having a bigger body, why pre-diabetes is a fake diagnosis, and why you don't need to cut out carbs to manage your blood sugar. I'm so excited for you to hear this episode. 

But before we get to Erin, I want to remind you that the Can I Have Another Snack? universe is entirely listener and reader supported. If you get something out of the work that we do here, please help support us by becoming a paid subscriber. It's £5 a month or £50 for the year. And as well as getting you loads of cool perks, you help guarantee the sustainability of this newsletter, have a say in the work that we do here and help ensure I can keep delivering deeply researched pieces that provide a diet culture-free take on hot nutrition topics like ultra processed foods, the Zoe app, and the deep dive on folic acid and folate that I just did recently.

All of those you can read at laurathomas.substack.com if you haven't already. And if you're not totally sold yet then maybe this lovely review that I got recently will help convince you. So one reader wrote: 

“I feel so lucky that I found your work around the same time I started feeding my kid real food. It saved me so much angst and has allowed me to relax and really enjoy seeing him explore eating. Your essays on sugar especially was a game changer. I'm sure it won't always be plain sailing, but I feel so much more prepared to ride the waves of his changing appetite. and tastes as he grows, accepting them as a feature and not a bug.

So hopefully he can have a much more relaxed relationship to food than I had for a long time. And I pay my £5 a month because I so value the work you put into your writing and think it's worth paying for. There's a lot of free advice out there, but I never know what I can trust. This is such a safe haven.”

So yeah, it's £5 a month or £50 for the year. You can sign up at laurathomas.substack.com or check out the show notes for this episode. And if you can't stretch to a paid subscription right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk for a comp subscription. No questions asked. You don't need to justify yourself. Just put ‘Snacks’ in the subject line. 

This is actually going to be our last podcast of the year. I'll be back in your ears in January with brand new guests. Paid subscribers will continue to hear from me in your inboxes and in the group chat, where I'm going to be holding space for all the venting and screaming at diet culture shit that gets dredged up over the holidays and into January. If you'd like to join us, you can sign up at LauraThomas.substack.com. Otherwise I'll speak to you in January. 

Okay, team. Over to Erin. 

MAIN EPISODE:

Alright, Erin. Can you please start by telling us a bit more about you and the work that you do?

Erin: Yeah. I am a registered dietitian. Well, in the United States, based in, um, the Seattle, Washington…I was gonna say, the ‘state of Washington’! And I'm also a certified diabetes care and education specialist. It used to be a certified diabetes educator and they wanted to add more letters. So I'm in private practice and I focus on working with people with diabetes and eating disorders at the same time, or people who had a history of an eating disorder and then were recently diagnosed with diabetes but don't want like It wouldn't be helpful or safe for them to go to just any diabetes educator.

So those are the folks that I work with.

Laura: Oka...

Hey everyone! Happy New Year and welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I’m Laura Thomas, I’m an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter.

I am really excited to share this week’s conversation; it is the perfect antidote to the January diet culture hellscape that we’re all living through. My guest today is gender studies professor and author Dr. Karen Throsby, whose book Sugar Rush (affiliate link) was an absolute highlight for me in 2023. I have been recommending it to everyone. Karen’s thesis in the book is essentially how the public health and popular science discourse around sugar obscures the social and structural inequality responsible for health disparities and by doing so, actively embeds it further into the fabric of society. 

I’ve split this conversation into two parts - so you’ll get the second half of the conversation in two weeks. But today we talk about how the conversation around sugar being bad for you is framed with so much certainty, whereas the science holds a lot more doubt and ambiguity. We talk about how nostalgic fantasies of a past where nobody ate sugar and everyone climbed trees all day long erases the unpaid labour of women, and how even modern day efforts to eliminate sugar are dependent on unequal distribution of household labour and are framed as work that is pleasurable, or else women get scapegoated as bad mothers. So much great stuff in this episode and like I said, I’ll share part two soon, where we get into the rhetoric around ultra-processed food, how the so-called war on ‘obes*ty’ fails to live up to it’s own aims and loads more. 

Before we get to Karen just a quick reminder that the entire CIHAS universe is reader and listener supported, meaning I literally can’t do this work without your support. If you like what we do here and want to help keep the lights on then you can upgrade your account to become a paying subscriber - it’s £5/month or £50/year. Not only do you support the time and labour that goes into producing the newsletter and podcast, but you get access to our weekly community discussion thread Snacky Bits. You can comment on posts, and you get access to my monthly Dear Laura column and the full archive. You’ll also see a bit more bonus content on free essays that’s just for paid subscribers in the coming months, so make sure you’re signed up to get in on that action. Head to laurathomas.substack.com or check out the show notes for that link.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter here.

Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: Karen, I'd love if you could begin by sharing a bit about you and the work that you do.

Karen: Yes, thank you. So I'm a sociologist, I'm a professor of gender studies at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. And throughout my 20 plus years of career, I've been looking at issues of gender, bodies, technology and health.

So I've done work on reproductive technology, on surgical weight management, I've done work on endurance sports and what you do to a body when you engage in endurance sports socially, what does that mean? And then most recently, I've been working on what I've been calling the social life of sugar. How can we think about sugar in a moment when sugar is being attacked as a kind of health demon, the constant in my career has been this idea about bodies and how we try and change bodies or how bodies change and then most recently in relation to food and particularly sugar,

Laura: Tell us a little bit more about that because, you know, you kind of say this almost quite flippantly. “Oh yeah, I’ve been doing sugar”, but that's like a whole like undertaking in terms of research and then the book that came out of that. So, could you maybe tell us a little bit about the research that you did that went into, you know, studying the social life of sugar and, and maybe a little bit about the process of writing the book as well?

Karen: Yes, of course. So, it started from observation, which is where a lot of research comes from – of noticing just a lot of sugar talk in the media, for example. And so, I decided to look at it more formally. So, I actually did a, I started with newspapers and I looked at newspaper coverage from 2000. So I ended up looking to 2020 when I searched for newspaper articles in nine UK newspapers. So across the political spectrum and broadsheet, tabloids as well, looking for articles of quite substantive articles like sort of 500 words or more with the word sugar in the title.

And then I filtered those. So I took out all of the irrelevant things. So there's lots of mentions of Alan Sugar, uh, for example, lots of sugar metaphors, like a ‘spoonful of sugar’ that you get in business reporting. And I took all those out. And then I kind of looked at the pattern and what you see from 2000 to about 2012, it's very, a very low level of coverage, just trickling along very low.

And then in 2013, it starts to shoot up. And then by 2016, it's really high and it peaks there. And then it drops off a little bit, picks up again at 2018 and then slowly falls away. And so I took 2013 through to towards the end of 2020 as the period of study, and that ended up with about 550 newspaper articles that then became my objective analysis of what's happening with sugar.

And then I dug out anything else I could find. So policy documents and newspaper, medical articles, self-help books, popular science tracks – anything I could find about sugar. And that became the body of data that I then was analyzing just to see: how is sugar being talked about? Who is being excluded when we talk about sugar?

Trying to see it, not literally, but thinking about what is sugar doing socially when we talk about it.

Laura: Yeah. It's, it's an, I'm just thinking of this from a research perspective. It's a huge undertaking. I'm just imagining you going through your Nvivo now, it's just like,

Karen: exactly. You're right there. I mean, it was an unusual project for me, because all my other projects have been broadly ethnographic. So I've actually gone and observed groups, a social, social organization, and so on, um, or done interviews and things like that. So this was a departure for me that it's very text based. It's looking at how it's reproduced and represented in text, in different kinds of text.

But you ask the same questions, what is a newspaper trying to achieve in writing in this particular way? What is a popular science track trying to achieve in writing about sugar in a particular way? And then you can start thinking about, so what does sugar mean in different contexts, but also what kind of work does sugar enable us to do socially?

Laura: Mm hmm. So can you tell us a little bit more about the sort of, maybe just like the headline conclusions that you drew out with this and then and we can kind of get into some of the more specifics in a second.

Karen: Yeah, I mean the bottom line for me was that sugar and wh...

Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I’m Laura Thomas, I’m an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter.

Today I’m sharing part 2 of my conversation with Professor Karen Throsby, author of Sugar Rush.  If you’re just joining us then make sure you go back and listen to part 1 of this episode before you jump into this one. We talk about mortified mothers, how removing sugar from the diet is gendered work that falls on women, and how the certainty around the ‘badness’ of sugar belies a lot more doubt and ambiguity coming from the scientific community. So go back and check out part 1 if you haven’t listened already.

Today we’re getting into why the so-called ‘war on ob*sity’ has to constantly reinvent itself to stay relevant, and how it fails to meet its own objectives. We also talk about how ultra-processed foods are quickly becoming the new sugar and how that conversation fails to acknowledge the role that convenience foods play in offering immediate care or the privilege in being able to eat for some nebulous future health. And we couldn’t talk about sugar and not talk about Jamie Oliver and the sugar tax.

INTRO

Before we get to Karen, a super quick reminder that all the work we do here is entirely reader and listener supported and the podcast is my biggest operating cost. I will do everything I can to keep it free and accessible to everyone, and you can help by becoming a paid subscriber - it’s £5/month or £50 for the year (and you can pay that in your local currency wherever you are in the world). Paid subscribers get access to the extended CIHAS universe including our weekly discussion threads, my monthly column Dear Laura and the whole back archive. You also support the people who work on the podcast, and help ensure we can keep the lights on around here. You can sign up at laurathomasphd.co.uk and the link is in your show notes.

As always, if you’re experiencing financial hardship, comp subscriptions are available, please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and put the work ‘snacks’ in the subject line and we’ll hook you up. 

Thank you as always for your support and for making this work possible.

Alright team, I know you’re going to love the second installment of this episode so let’s get straight to it - here’s part two of my conversations with professor Karen Throsby. 

Here’s the transcript in full:

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: Karen, I want to come back to this idea that you articulate so well in the book. You say that “the so-called war on ob*sity has been unable to warrant its core empirical claims” – I'm quoting you now, “and has been a notable failure when measured against its own goals of sustained population level weight loss.”

Can you explain how in order to sustain itself, the war on ob*sity had to reinvent itself like Madonna? By casting a new villain…and kind of talk about that arc a little bit? 

Karen: Yeah. So if we think about, I mean, obviously the sort of attack on fat bodies has, has a very long history, but if we think about its most recent history in, in the form of the war on ob*sity, which dates to around the turn of the millennium as a new kind of intensified attack where dietary fat was seen as the core problem.

Sugar has always been seen as a problem. We can even go back to the 1960s and the rise of artificial sweeteners. and their take up in the diet industry. So it's always been there as a problem, but it was really fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. And that's why, when I looked at the newspaper articles, sugar was hardly talked about because the focus was different.

And I think what we get is then with that repeated failure, where there has been a base, I mean, there's…in the UK, there's been a leveling off of ob*sity rates, but it doesn't meet the aspirations of the attack on ob*sity. It has been a failure. And I think it runs out of steam because it's not achieving the change.

And, and yet you get this kind of constant hectoring and sort of constant renewal. I can't…there's been…I can't remember. It's like 17 policies or something, you know, in the last 20 years. And it's, you know, none of them are successful, have been successful. And then, so we get to about 2012, and one of the things that happened in the UK, of course, was the Olympics, where there was a lot of anti-ob*sity talk.

It was seen as a way of refreshing the war on ob*sity, and I think that partly opened the door. 

Laura: Yeah. I'm sort of smirking, because I was in the States at that point doing my PhD, so I kind of, like, missed a lot of what was going on here, around 2012 in the Olympics. So yeah, it's really interesting that you're, you're not, you noted that, that that kind of anti…

Karen: Like a core, a core justification for the, for funding, you know, a mega event like the Olympics was that it would boost sport, which would boost attempts to reduce ob*sity. And so you've got that in the background, you've got the fact that it is losing steam, you know, and so it needs to find another, another enemy, something to pick it back up again. 

And sugar, I think…because at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, we've got austerity measures being consolidated through the Welfare Reform Act in 2012, all of those welfare cuts in place. So then the idea of sugar, and the kind of an austerity worked really well together, the idea that individuals should make small economies to get by to manage their own consumption, that you shouldn't over consume because it costs the state, it costs other people money. And so those narratives came together perfectly and sugar just became this, this model enemy for the moment.

And then what we see then is the rise of interest in the sugar tax. which was announced in 2016, which is the peak in the newspaper coverage, and then was launched in 2018. So in a, in a sense, the history of the social life of sugar during this moment is an arc that sort of covers the rise to the sugar tax and then its implementation.

But all of the expectation that had been laid on fat is then laid onto sugar as the problem. If only we can solve this problem. And so again, as I said before, it creates this erasure of the absolute complexity of food and eating. The idea that food is only ever swallowing and metabolising, it's, you know, it's so social, it forms so many social functions around love, care, comfort, you know, all of those things that it’s just completely inadequate.

And then what we've got now is a tailing off. And actually it tailed off during the pandemic, there was a little peak at the beginning, if you can remember when Boris Johnson launched an anti-obesity policy, when he came out of hospital, he was blaming his own body size on the fact that he'd been very unwell. And so we saw a little peak then, but it's basically dropped off now.

So in sort of 10 years, we've had a sort of complete focus on sugar and then this tailing off of interest in it. And I think now what's coming in instead is ultra processed food is now filling that gap, but it's folded sugar into it because obviously ultra processed food is, as almost all, I mean, has always got sugar in it. And so it's picked up the sugar as it's gone. So it's, all of that is still there, but it's now being talked about in terms of ultra processed food.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking to writer and parent educator Eloise Rickman. Eloise’s work focuses mainly on challenging adultism, championing children’s rights, and helping parents and educators rethink how they see children. In this episode, we touch on how diet culture shows up in gentle parenting spaces and how mainstream ideas of gentle parenting don’t always challenge where power comes from and how it’s leveraged. We’ll also talk about kids’ embodied resistance and Elosie’s new book, It’s Not Fair.

Don’t forget to leave a review in your podcast player if you enjoy this episode - or let me know what you think in the comments below.

Find out more about Eloise’s work here.

Pre-order Eloise’s new book here.

Follow her on Instagram here.

Follow here on Substack -

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter here.

Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

INTRO:

Laura: Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast where we talk about appetite, bodies and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter.

Today we’re talking to . Eloise is a writer ( ) and parent educator. Her work focuses on challenging adultism, championing children’s rights, and helping parents and educators rethink how they see children. 

Today we’re going to talk about how diet culture shows up in gentle parenting spaces and how mainstream ideas of gentle parenting don’t always challenge where power comes from and how it’s leveraged. We’ll also talk about kids’ embodied resistance and Elosie’s new book, It’s Not Fair.

But first - just a quick reminder that Can I Have Another Snack is entirely reader and listener supported. If you get something from the newsletter or podcast, please consider a paid subscription - it’s £5/month or £50/ year which helps cover the cost of the podcast,  gives you access to our weekly subscriber only discussion threads, the monthly Dear Laura column, and the entire CIHAS archive. Head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe now. And thank you to everyone who is already a paid subscriber.

Alright team, here’s this week’s conversation with Eloise Rickman.

MAIN EPISODE:

Laura: Alright Eloise, can you start by telling us a bit about you and your work?

Eloise: Yeah, of course. And whenever I do these, I'm always absolutely terrified, that I'm gonna forget something really big , like “I'm a writer” or “I work with parents”. So yeah, I'm a writer and I work with parents. I write books about children and about children's rights.

And I've just finished writing my second book, which is on the idea of children's liberation. which looks at all different sorts of topics from parenting to education to children's bodies. And alongside my writing work, I also work with parents running courses on home education and on rights-based parenting and on workshops as well.

I'm also – at the same time as doing this – home educating my daughter, who at the time of recording is eight, which also kind of feels like a full time job and just because life is not complicated enough, I'm also doing a Masters in children's rights at the moment, which is brilliant.

Laura: Okay, I have no idea how you find the time in the day to do all of those different things, but I am in awe. And you mentioned that you just finished writing your second book, but you didn't say what it's called.

Eloise: Sorry, I didn't, you’re right! So it's called It's Not Fair. Which is a title we deliberated over for a really long time, but I really like it because it's something which we hear so often from our children's mouths.

It's not fair, this isn't fair. So it's called It's Not Fair: Why it's Time for a Grown Up Conversation About How Adults Treat Children. And that really does sum it up. It's really looking at how we treat children in all different aspects of life. And why a lot of that treatment isn't fair and why we need to rethink it as adults who have more power than children.

Laura: Yeah, and I mean, that's really what I want us..we're going to explore these ideas a little bit in a second. But yeah, I've had a little sneaky peek of the book so far. And what I read is incredible. And I'm so excited for this book to be in people's hands because – we'll talk about this a bit more as well – but unlike a lot of just, you know, gentle parenting, like, more prescriptive books, I think that just tell you how to parent, what I really appreciate about your work is that you bring in the kind of socio-political lens, which I feel often gets missed out of a lot of these conversations. So, yeah, I'm really excited about your book coming out and we'll pop a pre-order link to it in the show notes so that people can have that little happy surprise delivered to their doorstep. There's nothing better than, just like, a book showing up that you've forgotten… 

 Eloise: Oh, I love it. 

Laura: …that you ordered six months ago! 

Okay. A lot of your work centers on the idea of dismantling adultism. I'm not sure that people will be completely familiar with that term, so for anyone who is just coming across it, can you explain what even is that and where do we see it show up in our kids’ lives?

Eloise: Absolutely, and I think you're totally right that it's not a term that most of us are familiar with at all, and I think that's a huge problem actually.

You know, we are now, I think, generally, as a society, getting better at spotting things like sexism or racism or ableism, and that is really important, you know, being able to name injustice when you see it is the first step to dismantling it, to tackling it. Otherwise, how do you really know what it is that you're dealing with and why it's a problem?

But yet, when we think about some of the treatment which children experience at the hands of adults, whether that's the fact that in England, at the time of recording, it's still legal to hit your child, even though we would never dream of women being allowed to be hit by their partners, or the fact that, you know, it's still really normal in so many school settings for children to be publicly humiliated, to be losing their break times and so on.

All of these seem to be quite disconnected from one another because we don't have the language to join them up. And I think th...

Our very first guest is artist Laxmi Hussain whose stunning work depicts the softness of bodies and the tenderness of early motherhood. We talk about her postpartum experience, and how, even as a mother of three, her instincts were undermined and gaslit. We talk about how new mothers (especially pandemic mums) are repeatedly let down and dismissed. Laxmi shares her experiences of sharing her studio with a toddler and how he has become part of her process. We then go on to discuss her family’s food culture and her own relationship to food and appetite. Lastly, we consider all the ways that our kids are told there is something fundamentally wrong with them, and how we as parents can give them the tools to develop resilience to these messages.

Find out more about Laxmi here

Follow her work on Instagram here

Buy her art here (and buy one for me while you’re at it!)

Follow Laura on Instagram here

Here’s the transcript in full.

Laxmi Hussain  I hope that's the same message my children will understand. And not just for my daughter, but for my sons, too, that women's bodies aren't a particular shape or size or height, or, you know, they're so different. And I want them to know that that's normal. Because it has to, we have to feel that way. Like, I know that I probably won't change it hugely in my lifetime. But if I can change it for them, then I think that's a big deal. And hopefully, that will carry on forward.

Laura Thomas  Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet Registered Nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. My very first guest is artist Laxmi Hussain. Laxmi has been drawing for as long as she can remember, as a child in London, she would lose hours after school, sketching on the counter in her dad's corner shop. But it's only since the birth of her first child that Laxmi has turned her passion into a profession. Reinspired by the irrepressible joy and creativity shown by her children, she picked up the pencil once again, finding artwork to be a valuable means of reclaiming her own identity amid the emotional learnings of motherhood. Her inspiration comes from the forms encountered in everyday life -- from the body, the tenderness of motherhood, the natural shapes of the body as a vessel, and its evolution throughout life. Working in several different media, usually at night, Laxmi is driven by experimentation, constantly exploring new techniques, and searching for the shapes and subjects they express best. I was so thrilled that Laxmi agreed to be on the podcast. Her depictions of early motherhood and bodies stuck together have felt so validating for me personally as I navigate the relationship with my body postpartum. They offer relief from the idealised images we see of postpartum bodies, while still being so tender and beautiful. I love everything that Laxmi has to say in this episode, from just how unapologetically she loves being with her kids, to learning about her family's food cultures and her passion for food. Through our conversations about how pregnant and postpartum people are gaslit and dismissed at every turn, to how we can prepare our kids for a world that teaches them their bodies are wrong, and that they don't belong. I think you're gonna really love this conversation. Before we get to Laxmi, I just wanted to let you know that you're listening to the long edit of this episode. And from October, I'll be publishing a shorter edit here in your podcast player, and a special long edit for paid subscribers as a little bonus for supporting my work. Alongside weekly discussion threads, my dear Laura column, and loads of other fun perks, you can head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe, it's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. And if that is inaccessible to you, for any reason, please just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk for a comp subscription. Before we get to Laxmi, I have a quick favour to ask you. If you enjoy this episode, I would really appreciate it if you could support me by rating and reviewing in your podcast player, and maybe even sharing with a friend. It makes a huge difference to a new podcast. You can find a full transcript of this episode over on substack again at laurathomas.substack.com. And I would really love it if you wanted to leave a comment over there to let us know what you thought of this conversation and to keep the conversation going. I'll also put some pictures of Laxmi's incredible art in there so you can take a look at how stunning it is. Oh, and if you are listening to this in the Don't Salt My Game feed, then please don't forget to hop over and subscribe in the Can I Have Another Snack? feed. Okay, here's my conversation with Laxmi

Laura Thomas  So Laxmi, we start each conversation with the same question, which is, who or what are you nourishing right now?

Laxmi Hussain  I am nourishing, actually, you know what, this summer I nourish myself and I also nourish my family. But in general, even though the kids are on summer holidays, it's more about me resetting, taking a break and taking stock of what I've been doing. The summer is generally slower for me workwise and so I try to fill my cup.

Laura Thomas  So you're kind of taking a beat from the artist world, artist life and stepping back into mum life.

Laxmi Hussain  Yeah and life and you know, I think I've inherited this from my mom. But I love my children and I love being with my family so much that just being with them and doing things that make them happy and you know, just being in that space with them. It's what makes my summer. And I really love it. And I consciously try not to work during the summer, I know it is a long break and not many people, it's quite a privileged thing to say that I can take six weeks off. But I do pop in and nourish my, my plant babies, I've got forest here. But I try to step away. And even though I'm physically not working, my mind never stops. So I do think it is a good time to, it's very useful for me, because then I come back in September, and I feel reinvigorated. I have new energy. And all those ideas have not stopped working in my brain, and I do write things down or sketch things down in a notebook. But I feel without it, my cycle wouldn't, wouldn't quite work.

Laura Thomas  So it's kind of, I hear what you're saying, that like, you have this creative mind. So you can never fully stop, you can't turn that off. But it sounds as though there's something in the kind of like stepping back and just being fully immersed with your kids that almost allows you to take that step forward again in September when the kind of, I sometimes think of September as like a new year. Instead of like January, it's like this reset moment in the year, isn't it?

Laxmi Hussain  Absolutely. And January, for me, is usually one of my busiest times, because it's sort of, people are starting new projects, people feel reinvigorated then, but then they approach people then so I'm so busy that I forg...

Before we get into today’s newsletter, I just wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who has subscribed, shared, commented and liked posts since my premature launch on Thursday (tl;dr I accidentally hit send as I was scheduling up a post for next week and had no choice but to just roll with it). After what has objectively been a terrible year, it’s heartening to have such a warm response to this new project. THANK YOU!

And if you haven’t already, you can join all the lovely folks introducing themselves to this fledgling community over here (and get the dl on what this newsletter is all about). Plus my first essay for Can I Have Another Snack? outlining all the ways the BMI sucks.

I also wanted to give you a little teaser of what to expect coming up this week: I have a piece coming on Tuesday about the National School Measurement Programme in schools (aka the ‘ob*sity’ report card). It takes a lot to shock me these days when it comes to the lengths the government will take to wage war on kids’ bodies, but even I was shook with some of what I found while researching this essay. Then, in our inaugural community discussion thread on Thursday, we’re looking at ‘The Nation’s Favourite PE Teacher’s’ kids book, and WOOF, it’s a lot. Then on Friday, I’ll be sharing the first interview from my new pod - also called Can I Have Another Snack? - inspired, I know. Today I’m sharing a short trailer of what to expect, alongside some snippets of conversation from this month’s guests, which you can listen to right here in Substack ^^^ (and soon in your regular Pod player - it might just take a few days for Apple to accept the feed). I’ve also put it in the DSMG feed for old timers.

So what’s the deal? Each week I’m asking my guests two questions - who or what are you nourishing right now? And who or what is nourishing you? Upcoming guests include  Laxmi Hussain, Naureen Hunani, Christy Harrison, Clara Nosek, and Julia MF Turshen (!!!!!!). We explore topics around postpartum bodies, food, sanctimommy culture, neurodiversity, diet-culture, kids, capitalism, anti-fat bias, and so much more.

Check out the preview above - or subscribe in your podcast player. The first full episode will drop on Friday, and the transcript is below if you’d prefer to read.

Hey, welcome to Can I Have Another Snack? A brand new podcast with me, Laura Thomas. Some of you might know me already from my books Just Eat It and How To Just Eat It, or from my old podcast, Don’t Salt My Game. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m an anti-diet registered nutritionist who helps people make peace with food and their bodies. I’m especially interested in helping parents navigate the hell-scape that is diet culture and to end the intergenerational cycle of body shame and disordered eating. 

So let me tell you about this podcast. Can I Have Another Snack is an exploration of appetite, identity, and bodies. We’re going to talk about how we feed ourselves and our kids (in all senses of the word!), and the ingredients we need to survive in diet culture. Every week I’m asking my guests two questions: who or what are you nourishing? And who or what is nourishing you? 

Over the next few weeks, you can expect delicious and nurturing conversations with artist Laxmi Hussain, dietitian Christy Harrison, and cookbook author Julia Turshen, among loads of other cool and inspiring guests.

But it doesn’t stop there - Can I Have Another Snack is a whole universe. In the show notes you’ll find a link to my Substack newsletter. The Newsletter is a place where I share deeply researched essays on fundamental topics in the anti-diet cannon - this month we’re taking a look at why BMI is bullshit, I’m exploring the history and the problems with the National Child Measurement Programme in Schools, and talking about why nutrition education in schools is really toxic. September has a sort of loose back to school theme. 

I’ll also host weekly discussion threads called Snacky Bits covering everything from Joe Wicks’ weird attempt to indoctrinate kids into capitalism through to how to clap-back to unwanted diet and body talk in front of your kids, plus my monthly dear Laura column, where I fashion myself as an agony aunt and answer your questions, plus  I’ll share downloads to help you with anti-diet parenting and so much more. 

And what’s so cool about hosting on Substack is that we can really build a community of people who can support and lean on each other. Or just scream into the void if that’s what you need to do. I’m also so excited to co-create this space with you - I want it to be a collaboration where you let me know what kinds of topics and segments you want covered and where we crowdsource ideas and solutions and share them with each other.  

I hope you’ll join me in creating something really special, or at least a place where you can show up as your authentic, unapologetic self. 

Can I Have Another Snack is a listener and reader supported project, meaning that if you like and value the work I do, you can opt to become a paid subscriber where you get commenting privileges, access to the archive and some of the other columns I described earlier, as well as be part of those weekly discussion threads. It’s just £5 a month or £50 for the year. Or if you are a superfan and you know you want to be part of this, you can become a founding member - I’m suggesting £100 but you can name your price - it’s more like a donation to help me get this work off the ground and give me a little confidence boost that I am not totally killing my career by doing this. In return, if you’re in the UK, I’ll send you a copy of both of my books and I’ll even sign them if you like. And you’ll also get a full subscription to the newsletter. 

And hey, I totally get that asking you to pay for things is weird, so many of us are used to getting things for free on the internet. And, so many of us are struggling at the moment. And I have become so used to creating podcasts and writing articles and instagram posts for free, that it feels really icky for me to ask for support. But this is work for me, writing is work, research is work, and my expertise as a nutritionist has value. In order to make this sustainable, I need support for my labour. And I also know that £5 a month is a much more accessible way to have a nutritionist in your pocket than paying for 1-1 services, so I really hope I will be worth every penny of that £5. It also helps me pay for things like a podcast editor and to pay my guests for their time, which is also really valuable.

And I know that some of us can’t stretch to £5 a month right now, and if that’s you, please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and just put ‘comp subscription’ in the subject line - you don’t have to explain yourself - just put comp subscription in the subject line and email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and we’ll hook you up. 

There are also some free ways you can support this project - please subscribe to the podcast on your...

This week I’m talking to a wonderful teacher and colleague - Naureen Hunani. I’ve known Naureen in a professional capacity for a while now, so it was cool to get to sit down with her and talk about some more personal stuff. Naureen and I talk about finding out that you’re neurodivergent later-in-life, the invalidation and gaslighting of being called ‘highly functioning’. Naureen tells us how she nourishes a family who have different needs when it comes to food and feeding, and how she is rejecting expectations that feeding has to look a certain way. And then we get into what it’s like to be a highly sensitive person who feels things others are feeling. And how being a highly feeling person under capitalism inevitably leads to burnout. Oh and of course, how she’s nourishing herself. This is such a special conversation - it just feels really restorative.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Naureen here

Follow her work on Instagram here

Follow Laura on Instagram here

Here’s the transcript in full.

Naureen Hunani  I think a lot of that, for me, comes from the fact that I had to really truly embrace and accept other parts of their development, right? When it comes to language or motor differences. And so we can't really pick and choose right, like, to me, you know, if I say I'm going to fully accept and embrace who my children are like, I cannot be selective in terms of which parts I'm going to embrace and which parts I'm not going to embrace, right?

Laura Thomas  Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet Registered Nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today I'm talking to one of my colleagues and teachers, Naureen Hunani. Naureen is someone I've known for a little while now in a professional capacity and whom I've had the privilege of learning a lot from, so it was really cool to sit down with her and learn more about her on a more personal level. Naureen is very well known and loved in the world of responsive feeding. But for anyone who doesn't hang out in that space, Naureen is a multiply neurodivergent, registered dietitian with over 17 years of experience. She is the founder of RDs for neurodiversity, and neurodiversity informed online continuing educational platform for dieticians, and helping professionals. She has a private practice in Montreal, Canada, where she treats children, adults and families struggling with various feeding and eating challenges through a trauma informed way, inclusive and anti oppressive approach. This is such a special conversation, it just feels really restorative. Naureen and I talk about finding out that you're neurodivergent later in life, the invalidation and gaslighting of being called highly functioning. Naureen tells us about how she nourishes a family who have different needs when it comes to food and feeding, and how she is rejecting expectations that feeding has to look a certain way. And then we get into what it's like to be a highly sensitive person who feels things that others are feeling and how being a highly feeling person under capitalism inevitably leads to burnout. This is a really rich and meaningful conversation. I really hope you get a lot from it. But just before we get to Naureen, I wanted to let you know that you are listening to the long edit of this episode. From October, I'll be publishing a shorter edit here in your podcast player feed, and a special longer edit for paid subscribers of the Can I Have Another Snack podcast, just as a little bonus for supporting my work. You'll also get weekly discussion threads, my dear Laura column, and lots of other fun perks. You can head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe. It's just five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. And if that is inaccessible to you please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk for a comp subscription. I'm keeping all the content on Can I Have Another Snack free for the month of September, and turning on the paid community features and paid subscriber-only columns from October. If you value this work you can help keep it sustainable by becoming a paid subscriber. And last thing, if you enjoyed this episode, I would really really appreciate it if you could support me by rating and reviewing in your podcast player, and maybe even sharing it with a friend. It makes such a huge difference to a new podcast. You can also find a full transcript of this episode over on substack again at laurathomas.substack.com. And I would really love it if you wanted to leave a comment over there to let us know what you thought of this episode and to keep the conversation going. All right, team. Here's Naureen. 

Laura Thomas  I wanted to start out by asking you who or what are you nourishing right now?

Naureen Hunani  I really love this question. And you know, the first thing that comes I guess to my mind is like my role in nourishing my family. Right? So who am I nourishing? And, you know, I think about being a mother to two neurodivergent children, you know, obviously food is there right? That's a huge part of parenting and one of the probably the toughest jobs you know, feeding a family can be difficult for a variety of reasons. But I'm also thinking about, like you know, different ways I nourish my children when it comes to nourishing their curiosity and their development and just growth in general. Right? It's interesting because I have always been a very sensitive person. So putting others first because I just feel a lot. And that's, you know, very, I guess common for a lot of us, you know, neurodivergent moms like, we just feel so much. So what that does, sometimes it's just you want to, you know, prioritise other people's needs, because you feel so much of what the person is going through their pain, or suffering and all of their needs. And sometimes what happens is that, you know, we don't prioritise our needs, and that's something I've been exploring a lot in the last little while is, you know, how can I nourish myself better, and you know, that it's something that I'm still kind of exploring, this is really new to me, you know, prioritising my needs, and you know, what they are, and giving myself the permission to be who I am and nourish different parts of who I am, you know, my different identities. So I am a South Asian, immigrant woman living in North America, I'm a late diagnosed, you know, multiply neurodivergent person. I also have a non-apparent, physical disability. So, you know, figuring out all of those parts, and of course, also how they interact with my work as well, like being a dietitian, and working in a profession where the majority of dietitians don't look like me. And so yeah, like, how do I best nourish the humans I work with, my family, but also like, you know, meet my needs, nourish my passions. Yeah.

Laura Thomas  I think that's such a complex and tricky thing to try and unpack and figure out how to do, particularly when you're a parent, and I'm sort of speaking from my own experiences here. And I'm curious to ...

When Christy Harrison posted on her Instagram that “giving birth broke me open in every way imaginable” I knew I needed to ask her about it. The anti-diet dietitian and author of Anti-Diet and the forthcoming Wellness Trap tells me about the heartache and joy, tenderness and vulnerability of becoming a new parent. This is the conversation I wish I’d had as a new parent. We also hear about Christy’s exciting new book, and how the wellness industry can be especially dangerous for new parents. And, hear Christy's thoughts on the idea that we are ‘born intuitive eaters’ as she navigates milk feeding and introducing solids with her daughter. This is such an enriching conversation, but ngl, it gets heavy in places. Have some tissues handy, and if hearing about traumatic experiences related to birth isn’t for you today, then give this one a miss.

Find out more about Christy here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Here’s the transcript in full.

Christy Harrison  You know, again, sort of feeling like giving birth like broke me open, it's like, it's, it kind of released some of that anger and made me like more soft and vulnerable and, you know, just less, less angry and less kind of, you know, I don't have such tightly balled up fists anymore, even when I'm critiquing structures and systems that are harmful.

Laura Thomas  Hey, Welcome to Can I Have Another Snack podcast, where I'm asking my guests who are what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet Registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to anti diet dietician Christy Harrison. Many of you will know Christy already. She is host of the Food Psych podcast, author of Anti Diet and the forthcoming book, The Wellness Trap. This conversation is one that I've really been looking forward to sharing. Christy tells us all about what life has been like as a new mother who is nourishing two babies, her human baby and her second book The Wellness Trap. Christy gives us a little peek inside the new book sharing some of the research that she's uncovered about the wild wild west of the wellness world. And how a lot of the really harmful wellness dis- and misinformation really capitalises from parents who are just trying to do the best for their kids. We also talk about her experiences with milk feeding, and then going on to introduce solids with her baby and how that has made her reconsider some of the things she says about intuitive eating being a birthright. I think you'll be really interested in hearing what she has to say about that. And finally, I asked Christy about a post that she shared on her Instagram, which said, giving birth broke me open in every way imaginable. And also, this was a really tough and pretty emotional conversation. It felt like the conversation that I wish I had heard about birth, rather than the conversations about whether you should, I don't know, shave or wax, which are real articles that I've seen in parenting publications in 2022. But anyway, just a heads up that we do talk about traumatic themes in this episode around birth and the early weeks of recovery and medical trauma. So if you aren't up to hearing them right now, then I trust you to do whatever you need to do to look after yourself. We'll get to Christy in just a moment. But first of all, I wanted to let you know that you are listening to the long edit of this episode. From October I'll be publishing a shorter edit here in your podcast player and a special long edit for paid subscribers have the Can I Have Another Snack podcast as a little bonus for supporting my work alongside weekly discussion threads, my dear Laura column, and loads of other fun perks on Can I Have Another Snack newsletter, you can head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. And if that's inaccessible for you, please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk for a comp subscription. I'm keeping all the content on Can I Have Another Snack free for the month of September, and turning on the paid community features and paid subscriber only columns from October. If you value this work, you can help keep it sustainable by becoming a paid subscriber. And last thing if you enjoy this episode, I would really really appreciate it if you could support me by rating and reviewing it in your podcast player and maybe even sharing it with a friend. It makes a huge difference to a new podcast. You can find a full transcript of this episode over on substack. Again, that's laurathomas.substack.com. And I would really love it if you wanted to leave a comment over there to let us know what you thought of the episode. And to keep the conversation going. Alright team, here's Christy.

Laura Thomas  Christy, I'd love it if you could tell us who or what you are nourishing right now.

Christy Harrison  That's such an interesting question for me at this moment because I feel like I'm nourishing two very important and very different things. The number one being my baby. I'm breastfeeding and also giving her solid foods and so like really literally nourishing a human being, you know, and it's like incredible and overwhelming sometimes and feels like a huge responsibility and, you know is so fraught in some ways with diet and wellness culture, as I'm sure we'll get into and so, but it's also like beautiful and just such a beautiful bonding experience. And I feel really lucky to be able to breastfeed because, I mean, many, many people aren't. And I didn't think I was going to be able to at first because I had a traumatic birth experience and wasn't able to breastfeed right away. And so the fact that it, like, ended up happening at all is kind of a miracle. And so it's been like this beautiful bonding journey of feeding her and just getting to spend that time cuddling and you know, having time together, but just in the past couple of weeks, she started biting. So got a tooth. And it's like, it's brought up so much, because, you know, it hurts, it scared me, I sort of reacted, and then she reacted and cried, and, you know, and then I got scared and started to feel really anxious every time I was feeding. And so this beautiful bond that we've had that I don't think I even fully appreciated while I was in the easy part. And, you know, sometimes I'd be like, looking at my phone and like, doing other things while feeding her like, suddenly I'm like, no, like, Why did I spend all that time, you know, not paying full attention, not being fully in this moment, when now it's going to be taken away from me, you know, potentially soon, in a way that feels like it's too early. And yet, you know, we have fortunately been able to consult with a lactation consultant, and she's helped a lot in terms of, you know, figuring out a better position and better strategies to kind of alleviate the teething pains so that she's not biting on my boob. And so, you know, it continues, our breastfeeding jour...

This week I’m speaking to Clara Nosek, AKA Your Dietitian BFF. Outpatient dietitian by day, nutrition influencer-disruptor by night. This episode is all about getting to know the ‘new’ you post baby and figuring out this new identity; and finding your main character energy. We touch on so many other topics along the way - pandemic babies, the yes/and of pregnancy, the weird shit our bodies do, the toxic independence mothers are expected to perform. Unsolicited advice, finding your mom gang, sanctimommy culture, the overlap between diet culture and the pressure to be a perfect parent, and how the pipeline of perfect ‘mom’ to food-fear-mongering is a slip and slide. It’s a good time. LFG.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Clara here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Here’s the transcript in full.

Clara Nosek  And then there's also like, once you give birth, you are not who you were before. Right? are not who you were when you were pregnant. And so now who are, you have no idea. And so there's that trying to wrestle with that new you while also taking care of this other person, while also dealing with the pressure of like, okay, now I want to be like the perfect mom. And then while also like, like dealing with who am I to my partner, who am I to myself who am I to my friends? And I think yeah, like that's, it's weird. There's no books on that. 

Laura Thomas  Hey, welcome to Can I Have Another Snack podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they are nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet Registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter? Okay, so if last week's episode with Christy was a tear jerker, then this week's episode will make you laugh your ass off. I'm joined by your dietician BFF herself, Clara Nosek. Clara is an outpatient dietitian by day and a nutrition influencer disrupter by night, even though I'm pretty sure she would hate me calling her that. Clara is the creator of big sister nutrition or she'll tell you how she sees it, but she definitely won't tell you what to do. We talked about so many things on this episode. Like there's almost nothing that we don't touch on. We're talking about pandemic babies, the yes and of pregnancy and the weird shit that our bodies do. The toxic independence mothers are expected to perform. We talked about unsolicited advice, finding your mom gang, sanctimommy culture and the overlap between diet culture and the pressure to be a perfect parent. And how the pipeline of perfect mum to food fear mongering is a slip and slide. But what I think this episode is really about is getting to know the new you post baby and figuring out this new identity and finding your main character energy. And this conversation wouldn't be complete without a deep cultural analysis of reality TV, and why Clara loves it so hard. So after we recorded this episode, Clara sent me a side note she wanted to add about this conversation. So I'm just going to read the whole email now. Clara said I just had a thought that perhaps could use more context RE: The perfect mom to food fear mongering anti science pipeline, and that yes, one critical thinking and slash understanding is needed but also two the nuance and context of white supremacy and the creation of distrust, and the roots in how white people have treated/experimented on communities of colour. So from a black indigenous POC lens, there is historical evidence to dust distrust mainstream slash white standards, and white people who benefit and perpetuate and believe in the distrust, but can't be bothered to explore why it's there in the first place, or the role of white supremacy plays in informing those thoughts are problematic. And just to add to Clara's note here, I was also thinking about how science gets weaponized against communities of colour and marginalised communities to gaslight, their lived experience and undermine cultural medicines, for example. So just wanted to give that context to our conversation. I also wanted to add that guests on kind of have another sack are paid for their time on their labour for being here. This is not the norm in the podcast world, I think I've been paid maybe once for doing a podcast in my life. And I've done a lot of podcasts. But it's work. And that's why I want to make sure that the guests that appear on Can I Have Another Snack get paid. And the only way that this is possible is through the support of the people listening. So that's you guys, by supporting this work by becoming a subscriber. So I wanted to say thank you if you've already subscribed, all of this was just to say that Clara has decided to donate her honorarium for being here to Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, who are working to bring relief and clean water to communities who need it most in Jackson, Mississippi. I'm also going to link to that fund so if you'd like to make your own contribution, then you can just click the link in the transcript for this episode. And while we are talking about subscriptions, I just wanted to let you know that you are listening to the long edit of this podcast episode. From October I'll be publishing a shorter edit here in your podcast player on a special long edit for paid subscribers of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. As a little bonus for supporting my work. Alongside weekly discussion threads, my dear Laura column, and loads of other fun perks, you can head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe, it's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. And if that's inaccessible to you, for whatever reason, please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk for a comp subscription. I'm keeping all the content on Can I Have Another Snack free for the month of September and turning on the paid community features and paid subscriber only columns from October. If you value this work, you can help keep it sustainable by becoming a paid subscriber. And last thing, if you enjoyed this episode, I would really really appreciate it if you could support me by rating and reviewing it in your podcast player, and maybe even sharing it with a friend. It makes such a huge difference to a new podcast, I can't even tell you. So thank you for rating and reviewing. You can also find a full transcript of this episode over on substack. Again, that's laurathomas.substack.com. And I would really love it if you wanted to leave a comment over there to let us know what you thought of this conversation. And to keep the conversation going. All right team, here's Clara.

Laura Thomas  Alright, Clara, who or what are you nourishing right now?

Clara Nosek You know, I've had this thought a lot, recently, probably not framed in that way. But like, currently, this body I'm in now. When you're out of pregnancy, still sleep is questionable. At best. Also, this like role I...

Today I’m super pumped to be speaking with New York Times bestselling cookbook author Julia Turshen. As well as writing cookbooks Julia is the author of the Keep Calm & Cook On Substack and hosts the Keep Calm & Cook On Podcast, both of which I highly recommend. She also hosts these awesome Sunday cook along classes where you can make recipes in real-time with her from the comfort of your own kitchen. This may be my favourite conversation of the series so far. It just feels so wholesome and I know it’s going to be one I keep coming back to and sending my clients to, so I really hope you love it too.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Julia here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Here’s the transcript in full.

Julia Turshen I think for so long, I thought having, you know, a large appetite for food or, honestly an appetite for food period. I thought that was not a good thing. And that was something I would spend my whole life working against. You know, I thought I was gonna spend a lifetime trying to diminish my appetite. And then when I kind of zoomed out and I thought about that, I thought, Wow, that's so fucking sad. And I guess my relationship to my appetite or my appetites now is one of just tremendous curiosity. I feel like I've spent so long trying to pretend I don't want things that now I am just so curious about like, what do I want and then finding moments when I want a lot of something or a lot of things like when I have like a large appetite, I am just trying to go towards that with open arms.

Laura Thomas  Okay, welcome to Can I Have Another Snack podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they are nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter?

Today I’m super pumped to be speaking with New York Times bestselling cookbook author Julia Turshen. As well as writing cookbooks Julia is the author of the Keep Calm & Cook On Substack and hosts the Keep Calm & Cook On Podcast, both of which I highly recommend. She also hosts these awesome Sunday cook along classes where you can make recipes in real-time with her from the comfort of your own kitchen, so check them out if you’re looking for some kitchen and recipe inspo. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley in New York State with her spouse Grace and their pets. So as you'll hear, Julia's career started off, much more deeply rooted into wellness and diet culture, which was a reflection of her own difficult relationship with food. We talked about how she got from there to where she is now, which is a badass anti diet advocate who is vocal about anti fat bias in the food industry. And we have this really wonderful delicious conversation about how healing it can be to reclaim appetites both in terms of food and in a more generative and expansive sense. Julia talks about why this has been such a powerful tool as she divest from diet culture, and shares how she deals with those funky body image days. So, this may be my favourite conversation of the series so far. It just feels really wholesome. And I know it's going to be one I keep coming back to and sending my clients to. So I really hope you love it too. And also check out Julia's work, because she's really awesome. 

Before we get to the episode, I just wanted to give you a quick reminder that this is the last week where all Can I Have Another Snack content will be free. So don't sweat, you'll still get a weekly pod and twice monthly essays from me if you're free subscriber. But from the start of October, I'll be turning on the paid subscriber only features and sending out some posts to paid members only. So this is kind of a scary moment for me. It tells me whether or not this little newsletter and podcast has legs. If people are actually picking up what I'm putting down and whether or not there's a future here. To those of you who have already signed up, thank you so much. It means more than you know. And if you followed my work for a little while now, you'll know that earlier this year, I had to close my business, my entire career trajectory was uprooted. And I had to try and figure out my next moves while also trying to bring a sense of stability back to my family after an absurdly chaotic year. Actually make that two years. Anyone who has ever read one of my Instagram captions will know that I have a lot to say. But aside from my books, writing has never been part of my job. Substack offers this really neat model where I can make writing my job without having to sell out to do sponsored content or exploit my child for likes. He would get a lot of likes, by the way. But I don't want to exploit my baby. While I love my clinical work and I will always see clients I want to make my work accessible to more people. I wanted to really give this my best shot. And that's what this month has been about, to see if there's an appetite for conversations about food, bodies, and anti-diet parenting. So if you're in this for the long haul with me, then let me know by becoming a paid subscriber. There are tonnes of benefits to becoming a paid subscriber over and above the free subscription option. You'll get exclusive commenting privileges and access to our weekly discussion threads on Thursdays called Snacky Bits. You'll also get a monthly downloadable resource like the snacks guide from earlier this month, you'll get access to a column called Dear Laura, where you can submit questions and have a non diet nutritionist in your pocket, you'll get bonus essays and access to all of the archived posts. Plus, you'll get my unwavering affection. It cost five pounds a month, or it's 50 pounds for the year, you can also become a founding member if you're a Can I Have Another Stack stan, where on top of everything I just mentioned, I'll also send you a signed copy of both of my books. I'm suggesting 100 pounds for that tier, but you can name your price, kind of like a donation to help me get this work off the ground. And if you can't afford to support me financially, then you can help spread the word by forwarding your emails to friends who might be interested. Liking posts also helps a lot. And you can rate and review on Apple podcasts. And if you need a comp subscription for any reason whatsoever, then email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with snacks in the subject line and we'll hook you up. You don't need to give an explanation of your situation. I trust that if your circumstances change, you'll do your best to support my work. Alright team. Thank you so much for being here and for supporting my work. Now le...

Today I’m talking to Rachel Millner - a psychologist, Certified Eating Disorder Specialist and Supervisor, and a Certified Body Trust® provider. Rachel works with people struggling with all forms of eating disorders and disordered eating and those wanting to break free from diet culture.

This episode dives into the stickier, messier parts of anti-diet parenting (which I think we can all relate to!) and Rachel tells us how she is creating a shame and judgment free environment when it comes to food and bodies. She shares some of the places that she sees parents struggle when it comes to supporting their kids' relationship to food: misguided restrictions that can backfire, and parents trying to control kid’s weight so as to protect them from shame (and all the complexity of that). This is such an open and honest conversation where Rachel names all of the complexity and messiness of a lot of these issues and how she owns up to fucking things up and how she repairs when she does, which I really appreciated.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Rachel here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Here’s the transcript in full.

Rachel MillnerI always want to ask the question of people of, if you weren't worried about fatness, would you be doing this? Like, if you weren't worried that your kids were gonna be fat, would you actually be focused on kale? Would you actually be trying to avoid feeding them certain foods? And usually the answer is no.

Laura ThomasHey, welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Rachel Millner.

Rachel is a psychologist, certified eating disorder specialist and supervisor, and a certified body trust provider. Rachel works with people struggling with all forms of eating disorders and disordered eating, and those who want to break free from diet culture.

In this episode, we talk all about the stickier, messier parts of anti diet parenting. We talk about how Rachel's twins have really different needs when it comes to food. And how she's creating a shame and judgment free environment when it comes to food and bodies. She shares some of the places that she sees parents struggle when it comes to supporting their kids' relationship to food, misguided restrictions that can backfire, and parents trying to control kids' weights so as to protect them from shame and the complexity of that whole conversation. She also shares her experiences as a fat parent and how she sits with the discomfort of feeling judged by other parents. I really appreciated how Rachel names the complexity and messiness of a lot of these issues and how she owns up to fucking things up and how she repairs when she does.

Before we get to Rachel's episode, just a reminder that we're now in October, which means that if you haven't already switched to a paid membership of Can I Have Another Snack then you are missing out on the cool community only features like our weekly discussion threads, snacky bits, and our monthly Dear Laura Column, plus, this month you'll get my Raising Embodied Eaters download. And if you're listening to this on the Friday that it goes out, so that's the 7th of October, there will be a super juicy and personal piece that I have written going out to subscribers only this weekend. So if you've been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, then now is the time. It's five pounds per month or 50 pounds for the year. And if you can't afford that right now, but you really feel like you'd benefit from this content, then just email hello@laurathomahsphd.co.uk and put snacks in the subject line. No explanation necessary.

Just a quick thank you to those of you who have already subscribed. It really means a lot, and I appreciate you putting your belief in this work and helping me make this writing project sustainable.

All right, gang, here's Rachel.

Laura ThomasAll right, Rachel I would love it if you could share with us who or what are you nourishing right now? 

Rachel MillnerYeah. My kids, myself, our two dogs, friends, family. It feels like this time of year especially, there's lots around me that need nourishing, which means I also need nourishing. 

Laura ThomasYeah. It sounds like you've got a full plate of people and animals that, that kind of need attending to, and I'm, I'm curious to hear how you make space for yourself in amongst all of that.

Rachel MillnerYeah. It's interesting when you just said that, it made me think also about, between my kids and my animals, how different their needs are. Like I have two kids, two animals, and their needs are wildly different. And how my needs also change from day to day and week to week. And that there are definitely days and weeks that I get lost in the shuffle.

You know, I think being socialized female, I'm a single mom by choice. And so, you know, I think that sometimes it's hard to remember that, I need to make sure I'm nourishing myself. And not just with food, but in general, like with connection and with time to zone out and relax and not be having to take care of somebody else.

Laura ThomasI hadn't realized that you were a solo parent and that, I mean, just sending you loads of compassion because I find parenting one child with a partner to be a lot. So how old are your kids?

Rachel MillnerI have twins and they're 10. 

Laura ThomasOh twins. I didn't realize that they were twins. Okay. That sounds awesome And terrifying in equal measure.

Rachel MillnerThat's a good way to describe it. 

Laura ThomasAnd I'm so curious. This idea, like what you were saying about the kids and the animals, and sorry if it's really weird to compare your kids with your pets, but I feel like you did say it first, it's fair game. But like what were you thinking of there when you said that their needs were like, wildly different?

Rachel MillnerMy kids, even though they're twins could not be more opposite and we, my kids also laugh at how our two dogs sort of mirror and parallel them in personality.

And so they're, they need different kinds. I mean, for my kids they need different kinds of parenting. They need different types of food. They need different kinds of boundaries. They need different types of support in school. And. You know, obviously the pets are not in school and that kind of thing, but same, they need different boundaries, they need different ways to like have support in making sure that they are not doing things they're not supposed to do in the house. And yeah. So I think attunement is probably the word that comes to mind when I think about all of their needs and trying to be attuned to, you know, what my kids are needing in any given moment.

And also trying to explain to my kids why I may respond to one of them differently than the other. And helping them understand the ways that they're unique and that their needs are different.

Laura ThomasHmm. I'm really curious just because th...

Welcome to this week’s episode of Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast. This week is a solo episode where I’m reading the essay that I published earlier this week called Sweet Little Lies - it’s a kinda fun, but also kinda serious and sciency look at some really pervasive misconceptions we have around kids and sugar and just trying to set the record straight. I don’t want to call it myth busting because I find that sort of “I’m the expert” dynamic that weaponises science and replicates violent power dynamics to be super problematic. So here’s how I see things - if it resonates with you - cool. If not, just can it. You don’t need to listen to me if you don’t find it helpful. But I hope it can help you relax a little more around sugar (either for yourself or your kids) this Halloween and heading into the holiday season. 

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

No transcript today because the full piece is published here. 

I’m super curious to hear what you think about this format (i.e. an audio version of an essay). As I mention in the intro to this podcast, I’m going to be playing around a little with different post types when we wrap up series one of the pod in a few weeks. I’d love your feedback on what you thought of this format and if there’s anything you’d like to see me experiment with in the ‘off-season’ between season 1 and 2 (which will drop in Jan).

Last week I shared an essay called Some Reflections on a Changing Body which is a piece of my own body story - it’s a story about grief, about growing another human with your body, it’s about all the sneaky ways that diet culture teaches you to be small, and it’s about learning how to take up space and externalise shame. And how children, if we are priv…

I am SUPER excited to introduce this weeks guest - the fierce and fabulous Virgie Tovar! Virgie is an author of some really amazing books (which you’ll find linked in the transcript below), activist, and expert on weight-based discrimination and body image. Virgie also has her own pod called ‘Rebel Eaters Club’ and has her own column at Forbes, where she writes about plus size fashion and also how to end weight discrimination at work.

This conversation went in a totally different direction than I had expected it to, but in a really interesting way! I’m super excited for you all to hear this one, but we do talk a little about childhood abuse and eating disorders so if you don’t think you’re up for it right now, maybe shelf this episode for another day.

Find out more about Virgie here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s the transcript in full.

INTRO:

Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Virgie Tovar, and for the 1% of my audience who don't know who Virgie is, she's an author, activist, and expert on weight-based discrimination and body image.

She holds a master's degree in sexuality studies with a focus on the intersection of body size, race, and gender, and she's a contributor for Forbes where she covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work. Virgie edited the anthology, Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion, and she's the author of You Have The Right to Remain Fat and The Self-Love Revolution, Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color, which I will 100% be featuring when I cover body-affirming books for teens on my newsletter.

In this episode, we talk about the work Virgie is doing to heal her inner child. I really love how Virgie contextualizes this work as mothering work as part of her wider project of maternity, as she calls it. And that's where she's exploring whether she wants to be a biological parent and the layers of grief, social conditioning, and reconciling her own childhood that she has to go through in order to process.

This is not at all what I thought we were gonna be talking about today. Virgie kind of took this in an unexpected but really interesting direction. I really hope you enjoy it, so much juicy stuff in here, and I think you're gonna love this episode. But just a heads up that there is some mention of childhood abuse and eating disorders. We don't go into lots of detail, but if you're not in a good place today, then maybe sit this one out and come back when you're feeling a bit more up for it. 

And while you're here, just a reminder that if you're not a fully paid-up member of the Can I Have Another Snack community then you're missing out on so many great benefits like our Thursday discussion threads, Snacky Bits, where we're having smart conversations away from the noise and the fat phobic trolls of social media.

You'll also get access to my Dear Laura column where this month I'm answering a question from a stepparent about parenting a fat child. Plus you'll get access to my Anti Parenting Downloads Bonus podcast episodes and lots more. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, and your support allows me to pay a podcast editor, a copy editor for my long-form essays, and it pays for the hours and hours of research and other labor that is required to produce thoughtful writing. I figured this out earlier and five pounds a month works out as paying me 55p per article. So if you think that these articles are worth at least 55p, then please consider becoming a fully paid-up member of the Can I Have Another Snack community. And if you already are, thank you so much.

And if you fancy gifting a subscription to a friend, I would super appreciate that. Thank you. And if you need a comp subscription for any reason, then just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with ‘snacks’ in the email header, and we will hook you up - no questions asked.

And one last favour to ask. If you're listening to this in Apple Podcasts, please go and leave a rating and review. We haven't had any reviews yet, which is a total bummer because it really helps more people find the podcast and hopefully feel held and supported by these conversations.

And I know you all are listening, so please just drop a quick comment or leave five stars. I would really appreciate it. All right, team. Here's Virgie Tovar.

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: Alright Virgie, can you tell us who or what you are nourishing right now?

Virgie: When I think the, I mean, I think I'm nourishing a lot of things, but the first thing that comes to mind is, really nourishing my child self who is, has a, just has a lot of trauma and has a lot of, um, you know, like I, I started therapy about a year ago and it's been this really interesting kind of process of like almost trying to, you know, untangle something or figure out a puzzle or just like learn a whole new way of, of thinking, but it, it's just become really clear that my little Virgie self is super terrified. There's like all of these things that she doesn't like and she's really scared of and so just kind of not only understanding that she deserves and needs a lot of attention and care, but at right now, as, as a 40 year old person who is considering biological maternity, but probably not, not going to be a mother. Um, biologically, certainly. And I think kind of going through the grief process of letting go of that narrative, which is a cultural narrative. And it's also kind of an internal narrative and just recognizing that, you know, I think I learned this from a friend recently, or someone actually someone I follow on the internet who I'm hoping to work with on this topic. But, you know, really understanding that the project of that inner child who didn't really have a childhood, it is a legitimate form of maternity, is a legitimate motherhood project. And so I think it's like, what's what I'm nourishing is that kid, that inner kid. And also the sense that that in fact it is true, that raising her and caring for her is its own maternity project. And it's a leg...

I’m super excited to share this conversation with Anjali Prasertong - writer and registered dietitian, focused on food systems and racial equity. In this episode we talk about Anjali’s path towards anti-racism work, why anti-racism work is so badly needed in the field of nutrition and dietetics, and how you can begin to start noticing where white supremacy culture is showing up for you, and how to find places to start unlearning white supremacy, especially if you work in nutrition, but even if you don’t this is a really valuable conversation and I hope you learn a lot from it.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe to Anjali’s newsletter here

Follow her work on Instagram here

Follow Laura on Instagram here

Here’s the transcript in full:

Anjali Prasertong: And that was a really just clarifying moment for me where, you know, we're talking about all these systems in the world that we live in, that uphold white supremacy. And I just sat there and realised like, Oh, like I'm falling out of love with dietetics because I've never heard anyone talk about racism and the effect that white supremacy has on nutrition when we all know it has a huge impact. And it's, it's complicit, it's part of the system. And kind of in that moment I was like, I just wanna, like racial equity and anti-racism in food is what I'm interested in and it just doesn't feel like anything else I could do would be as impactful. So that, that was sort of the turning point for me professionally.

INTRO:

Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter.

Today I'm talking to Anjali Prasertong. Anjali is a writer and registered dietitian focused on food systems and racial equity. She's originally from Los Angeles where she was a contributing editor for the award-winning food website, the Kitchen, before moving to New Orleans, Louisiana, and getting her master's of public health degree. In New Orleans, she led an innovative city-funded corner store program that increased fresh food access in low-income neighbourhoods and worked with food entrepreneurs looking to operationalise racial equity in their businesses.

She currently lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and her two children. Her newsletter, anti-racist dietitian, which by the way, hard recommend, is about the intersection of nutrition and racial equity covering history, food systems, land, water, politics, basically everything that lies beyond the individual choices we make about the food that we eat.

Anjali writes about what she wishes she had learned as a nutrition student, and she's creating a space that centres honesty, vulnerability, and the lived experiences of people of colour. In this episode, we talk about Anjali's path towards anti-racism work, why anti-racism work is so badly needed in the field of nutrition and dietetics, and how you can begin to start noticing where white supremacy culture is showing up for you and how to find places to start unlearning white supremacy, especially if you work in nutrition.

But even if you don't, this is a really valuable conversation and I hope you learn a lot. And while you're here, just a reminder that if you're not a fully paid-up member of the, Can I have another snack community then you're missing out on so many great benefits like our Thursday discussion threads, Snacky Bits, where we're having smart conversations away from the noise and the fat-phobic trolls of social media.

You'll also get access to my Dear Laura column where this month I was answering a question from a stepparent about parenting a fat child. Plus you'll get access to my anti-parenting, my anti Diet parenting, not Anti Parenting downloads, bonus podcast episodes and loads more. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, and your support allows me to pay a podcast editor, a copy editor for my long-form essays, and it pays for the hours and hours of research and other labour that is required to produce thoughtful writing. If you need a comp subscription for any reason, then please just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with snacks in the email header and we will hook you up. No questions asked. And one last favour to ask. If you're listening to this in Apple Podcasts, please go and leave a rating and review. We haven't had any reviews yet, which is a total bummer because it really helps more people find this podcast episode and hopefully feel heard and supported by these conversations. All right, team. Here's Anjali.

MAIN EPISODE:

Laura: So Anjali, I'd love to know who or what you are nourishing right now.

Anjali: So I'm nourishing, um, my family who I'm always nourishing, uh, which is my husband Rob, and we have an eight-year-old son and a two-year-old son. But I'm also lately just been really nourishing myself. I have had a pretty big professional change in the last year and within the last two years, a lot of big life changes and it feels like the first time in a long time that I can just sort of enjoy the world around me. I mean, I think a lot of people are probably feeling similarly. And I've really been sort of getting back in touch with creativity, which used to be a big part of my life, um, and just trying to find ways to nurture that, whether it's going to museums or just spending time in nature, reading all sorts of different kinds of books and just yeah, just kind of reconnecting with that side of the world.

Laura: Mmmh. That comes through in your newsletter in your Friday post where you're talking about just things that have been bringing you joy lately. And I've so appreciated getting those posts in my inbox because it's a reminder to take stock and notice the things that are bringing us joy. And yeah, as you're sort of alluding to the world has felt really heavy the past two years. I mean, it has been a heavy place, and I think we do need those reminders to connect with joy because it also, you know when you are doing, particularly if you're doing work that is rooted in social justice in some way, it's very easy to get burnt out otherwise.

Anjali: Definitely. Yeah, I think. The Friday Joy pieces were sort of like, Oh, you know, I wanna have something else and, and what can be something that I don't need to do a lot of research for. But for me it's, it's been kind of a grounding practice to really think about like, what is bringing me joy, what's keeping me nourished And, I've just, in the last couple years, been able, it feels like I've been able to bring a lot of things into alignment with my life as far as being able to live my values.

And, this last piece of just getting back into writing again, which is something that I had done for my entire life, but had sort of stepped away from when I was doing my studies, just getting back to writing is really, I think it feels like just completing the circle for m...

Alright folks, here it is! The final episode of Season 1 of the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast (keep an eye out for Season 2 in the new year!) - and we’re ending with a bang! This week I’m chatting to Katie Greenall, theatre maker, writer, and performer of the award-winning autobiographical solo show ‘Fatty Fat Fat’. We speak all about Embodiment and disconnection from our body, and discuss how we can handle a funky body image day. They also give us the inside scoop on their upcoming show ‘Blubber’.

Find out more about Katie here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Katie: I've had like lots of us have, or on the, on the road to having, I hope, this sort of glass-shattering moment where you are like, Oh, I can live in my body, in my case, in my fat, queer body and be happy. Those things can coexist. I do not have to change the other thing in order to be happy. And I mean, happy in the fullest of sense. I mean, successful in whatever successful looks like, loved, cared for, fed, cherished, admired, like whatever that looks like. And, and that can change. And for the first sort of two decades of my life, I did not realise that I could be fat and any of those things.

INTRO:

Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter.

Today I'm sharing the last episode of Season One of the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast. I’ll be back in January with ten brand-new episodes with some incredible guests. And in the meantime you can follow along on the Can I Have Another Snack? Substack where I’m gonna be sharing some really cool features over the holiday period including my emo kid Christmas playlist, an anti-diet gift guide, and some guest holiday pieces from Kristen Scher and Virgie Tovar. You’re not going to want to miss them, they’re seriously great and I can’t wait to share them with you. So make sure that you’re signed up to receive those posts at laurathomas.substack.com

Alright team, I am so pumped to introduce you to today's guest. Katie Greenall is someone whose work I've followed for a long time, and I'm really excited for you to hear this conversation.

For those of you who don't know Katie, they are a facilitator, theatre maker and writer living in London. She makes autobiographical work that often explores fatness, queerness, and community alongside making work with young people and communities across London. Previously, Katie performed her award-winning autobiographical solo show, Fatty, Fat, Fat and is currently developing their new show Blubber, which we're gonna talk about in this episode. We're also gonna talk about embodiment and feeling disconnected from our bodies, and how Katie handles a funky body image day. 

Before we get to Katie, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely reader-supported. We don't have sponsors or do adverts or anything like that. I don't make money from affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you anything that you don't need. All I ask is that if you value the space and the community that we're building, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Yes, you get perks and bonuses and all of that great stuff. But more than that, you make this work sustainable and accessible for everyone. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. And if that's unaffordable for you just now, please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with the word snacks in the subject line, and we will hook you up with a comp subscription. No questions asked. Also consider gifting a subscription to one of your pals this holiday season, or getting someone to gift it to you. 

Alright, team, let's get to our last guest of the season, Katie Greenall.

MAIN EPISODE:

Laura: All right, Katie, can you tell us who or what you are nourishing right now?

Katie: I love this question. I would like to think that especially this week, I am nourishing myself. I am really trying to form some new habits this week. I've had a bit of a, I'd say a few big few months of lots of different things, particularly work-wise. And so this week I'm really focusing on building some new habits and just like getting my shit together a little bit.

And so, I've really been finding that really nourishing for me. Uh, so I would say top of the list, I'm nourishing myself. That isn't usually the case. That's usually, if I'm being really honest and reflective, that self and nourishment is usually much further down. But I'm really kind of stepping into that this week, which is why having this conversation with you feels like really beautifully timed because, um, yeah, I genuinely for the first time in a long time feel like I'm doing some nourishing of myself.

Laura: It sounds like that's kind of unfamiliar to you.

Katie: Hmm. Yeah.

Laura: I guess I have two questions on that. Like one is what, you know, what is difficult about that for you usually, secondly, you know, what is that, that self nourishment looking like for you at the moment.

Katie: I think it's difficult for a number of reasons. It's difficult because, one, I work a lot, um, So a big part of my job is facilitating and holding space for other people. Um, predominantly that's working with young people in different theater settings. Like I run lots of young companies, I work in schools, or with other, in other community settings.

So like my literal job is holding space for other people, um, maybe similarly to yourself, uh, or in a, kinda, in a very different way. But that idea of, of a big part of what I do is holding and hopefully nourishing other people, nourishing artists or, um, yeah, like young people, to be able to achieve what they want to achieve, to access new skills and stuff like that.

And so often when I get that, a lot of that work happens in evenings and at weekends. And so just stuff like eating meals and going to bed and having any sense of routine, which is something that is really important to me, just gets pushed further and further and down the list. And the more, you know, it was just definitely not revolutionary, but like the more tired you get, the more you feel like you're, it's harder and harder to keep hold of any of those things. So that's one thing. I think secondly is that I've been taught I shouldn't be taking care of myself. That like I, that me and my fat body don't deserve ca...

CIHAS pod is on a season break until the new year. But I promised you some fun bonus pods in the meantime, so here goes. Some juicy, unreleased content right here!

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This week, we’re jumping back to my conversation with the fabulous Virgie Tovar from episode 8 (if you haven’t listened to that ‘sode yet, now’s your chance). This snippet didn’t appear in the OG episode, but Virgie shares some really helpful tips on her approach to how to respond to a kid who asks ‘am I fat?’. Virgie sets out seven steps you can take to help you handle this question in an age-appropriate way, and considers things like what if you don’t feel OK about your body, and how you can help the kiddo if they are being bullied about their weight. Spoiler - I might have convinced Virgie to join the ‘Stack. And she might have agreed to write a very cool, fat Christmas love story to share on CIHAS in December 👀 👀

Find out more about Virgie here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Here’s the transcript in full.

INTRO

Laura: Hey, and welcome to a special bonus episode of Can I Have Another Snack? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter, so regular listeners will know that we are currently on a season break, and we'll be back with full episodes in January.

I did promise you all a few bonus tidbits from guests that appeared in season one. So today I'm sharing a snippet of conversation with Virgie Tovar who appeared in episode eight of the podcast. Go back and check out the full conversation if you haven't already. It was a really great episode. This snippet didn't appear in the original episode.

It's unreleased content where Virgie sets out her approach to how to respond to a kid who asks, am I fat? This is a question that I get asked so often that I wanted to create a dedicated resource that people could access without having to listen to a full hour long episode. It's also something that you might want to share with a co-parent, a spouse, or a partner, or even a grandparent, to help them navigate these conversations too.

Virgie sets out seven steps that you can take to help you handle this question in an age appropriate way. And she also considers things like, what if you don't feel okay about your body and how can you help the kiddo if they're being bullied about their weight? So we're gonna get to Virgie in just a second, but first a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? podcast and newsletter are entirely listener and reader-supported. That means I depend on community, meaning you listening right now to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, and you get access to our exclusive community only threads on a Thursday, the full back archive of essays and posts and dear Laura columns where I answer your questions and some bonus audio content, as well as the free posts that go out to everyone. If you value what we do here, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber and helping make this work sustainable. You can also gift a subscription to a friend this holiday season, and we have included a gift certificate for you to print out or email to your friend who is anti-diet curious, or your mom who kind of gets it, but could do with some extra help, or your partner who absolutely does not get it and needs a kick up the ass.

So you'll find that linked in the show notes for this episode, at laurathomas.substack.com, and if for any reason you can't pay for a subscription right now, but you would find it helpful to have access to this content, then please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with snacks in the subject line and we'll hook you up, no questions asked.

And thank you so much to those of you who are already paid subscribers who are helping to make this work sustainable. I really, really appreciate you backing me. All right. Let's get to my chat with Virgie where she is helping us navigate the question of how to respond to a kid who asks, am I fat?

MAIN EPISODE

Laura: So Virgie, something that you published on your newsletter recently that I really loved and would love to hear you maybe like talk us through it, because I thought it was such a helpful guide, was how to respond when a child asks, I guess their parent, or like it could be a spare-ent or a, you know, a family friend who, whomever you are in that child's life, what if they come to you with a question of, am I fat? And kind of thinking about our broader conversation of, of kind of respectful parenting and, and raising kids, you know, free from diet culture, free from body shame, how would you go about responding to that question?

Virgie: Yeah, I mean, I kind of walkthrough in the article seven steps, like step one. I really love that because it really helps people kind of visualise like what's happening. Right. I think, I think, you know, to begin with, before we even get into sort of the steps, the most important thing to understand is your job is fairly simple, right? Like the logistics of getting the job done, I'm gonna get into, but your job, if I can sum it up, is to basically, your whole goal is to convey that fat phobia is wrong. And so, you know, I think this is, there's sort of like a meta, like before we even kind of, right, like there's obviously the question, am I fat? It begs a response of yes or no. It begs a binary. But what I'm arguing is that we need to, when, when our, when a kid approaches us with that question, we need to actually be, you know, the adult in that moment by saying basically that this question is not the important question. The important question is, is seeing people through the lens of good body, bad body, is that something that we believe in? And the answer is no. So, you know, your job is simple basically to, to protect fat kids from fat phobia and from stigma and to teach kids of all sizes that fat phobia is wrong. And so just to kind of go through the steps really quickly,

First, recognise that changing narratives is really difficult. So in general, right, like you're being thrown a ball that is very, very complicated and fraught, and your job is to kin...

HEYO. And welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast! We took a break back in November after wrapping up Season 1 of the pod with Katie Greenall talking all things Embodiment, so check out that episode if you haven’t already.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We’re kicking off Season 2 with Whitney Trotter - Registered Dietitian and nurse, Anti-racism Educator/Consultant and Human Trafficking Activist. Whitney is also mother to a 6 year old who is a selective eater. In this ‘sode, Whitney and I talk about her daughter’s eating and what this brings up for her as a dietitian and eating disorder professional. Whitney goes on to talk about her work supporting parents with eating disorders who are really struggling in their relationship with food and their body, looking closely at the underlying anxieties that come up around eating and what they can teach us. We talk about what feeding children can bring up for parents who have eating disorders or disordered eating and how that experience can be so triggering.And Whitney talks about how going to the drive thru is 1) not something you should feel bad about and 2) something that can actually bring more connection when you’re feeding a family.

Find out more about Whitney here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Whitney: You know, I always think anxiety can teach us so much, right? Like, we typically treat anxiety as all bad, but I think it's a root of a lot of things. And so really leaning into, okay, what is the anxiety telling us? You know, are we, is there a fear? Right? So for sometimes, it's the meal that we're cooking. The parent or mom really wants their kid to have variety, but they're so worried about how this particular food is gonna show up for them. There's a lot of myths. There's a lot of lies that their eating disorder has told them about certain foods. And so really processing through that, processing okay, what feels safe to eat? What feels safe to share like community wise with our family. Things like that. And maybe even delegating, you know, what is their partner doing? Can the partner help with the meal times and the plating and the cooking, things like that, will that dial down some of that anxiety?

INTRO

Laura: Hey, and welcome to Season Two of Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Whitney Trotter.

Whitney is a registered dietician and nurse, anti-racism consultant and human trafficking activist based in Memphis, Tennessee. And as we'll learn, she's also the parent of a six-year-old who is a selective eater. So Whitney and I talk about her daughter's eating, and what this brings up for her as a dietician and an eating disorder professional. It touches on anxiety, fear, and feelings of failure, especially if you've made your whole career about nourishing people.

Whitney goes on to talk about her work supporting parents with eating disorders who are really struggling in the relationship with food and their body, looking closely at the underlying anxieties that come up around eating and what they can teach us. We talk about what feeding children can bring up for parents who have eating disorders or disordered eating, and how that experience can be really triggering.

We also talk about renourishing our inner child through eating nostalgic kid foods, and I talk a little bit about that article that I published last week on clean eating orthorexia and kids, which I've linked to in the show notes and the transcript, if you haven't already seen that. And we also talk about how mumfluencer culture and diet culture collide to make it seem like feeding kids is about an aesthetic as opposed to being based on something that's achievable or realistic or practical or even functional.

And then Whitney talks, uh, about how going to the drive-through is one, not something that you should feel bad about. And two, something that can actually bring more connection when you're feeding a family. Lots of really cool stuff. We kind of go all over the place, but in a good way. And I really enjoy talking to Whitney, she's someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for a long time, so I'm glad that we finally made it work. 

I just want to give a content warning. We talk about body image in the context of sexual assault and miscarriage. Not in any detail, but I just wanted to mention that it's there. We also talk about eating disorders and our experiences of having babies in the NICU and breastfeeding challenges. So if those are things that you don't need to hear right now, then please skip ahead. There will be another episode out next week. 

And before we get to today's episode, I just want to share that I am gonna be running my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop again in February. A lot of you have been asking about this. I kind of took a break from running workshops as I was getting my Substack up and going. Um, but now I'm able to kind of offer, I don't know how often I'm gonna do it, but we're gonna have one in February. It will be a 90 minute workshop completely online, and you'll be sent a copy of the recording afterwards to watch back.

So you know, if bedtime goes way later than you're expecting, then um, yeah, you'll be able to catch up with it another time. We'll be talking about how kids' embodiment gets disrupted by diet culture, and what this has to do with feeding and how it can affect the feeding relationship. We'll discuss why we need to throw the rule book out the window and let them have ice cream before broccoli, and we'll talk about how we can build trust in our kids to get what they need.

I'll offer a framework that can help you feel more relaxed about mealtimes whilst also encouraging kids to have autonomy. We'll talk about how providing supportive structure can encourage children to remain in touch with their internal cues for hunger satisfaction and pleasure and fullness. And I'll cover how fussy eating develops and talk about some developmental milestones with eating as well as tools to help move through it. We'll also talk about why cutting out sugar and saying things like just another bite can undermine kids' instincts around food. And we'll talk about how we can talk about food and bodies without causing harm. So you'll be asked to fill out a short questionnaire about your specific situation ahead of time, and I'll try and tailor the content to the audience as much as possible.

You'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters download. The workshop is suitable for grownups of kids of all ages, but I would say it's probably best for kids under 12. Parents, whatever that means to you and your family, grandparents, teachers, nutrition professionals, and anyone else working with kids ar...

Today I’m joined by dietitian and activist Jessica Wilson to discuss her new book It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies - a book that uplifts and celebrates Black women.

In the episode we talk all about what drove Jessica to write the book and why we need to re-centre the experiences of Black women in our conversations about bodies and eating disorders. Jessica shares some of her critiques of intuitive eating and body positivity, and why white supremacy isn’t the root of diet culture, but the whole damn tree. Plus, lots of Lizzo chat and great Snacks.

Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Find out more about Jessica here.

Follow her work on Instagram here.

Follow Laura on Instagram here.

Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.

Subscribe to my newsletter here.

Here’s the transcript in full:

Jessica: And so, so quickly it became diet culture has racist roots. And that was the concession. Like, we need to talk about both of these things in anti-diet spaces. And the way that we're gonna do it is say that diet culture, you know, make it really like this tree analogy. Uh, and then just happens to have racist roots.

Whereas I see white supremacy as the tree, it's what's sticking up out of the ground. It's what we can see. It's what is, you know, ruling and governing and decides, you know, who is able to fit under its branches. And I, you know, shrinking ourselves via, maybe that's the connection to diet culture there, is one way people are trying to seek shelter under this, you know, umbrella, this tree of white supremacy.

INTRO

Laura: Hey team, and welcome to another episode of Season Two of Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter.

I can't wait to share today's conversation with dietician and activist Jessica Wilson, who is also author of the forthcoming book, It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies. I've linked to this book in the show notes because you need to go and pre-order it immediately. So in this conversation you'll hear Jessica and I discuss her new book. We'll talk about some of the ideas that she presents in the book, like how the body stories and narratives of Black women are raised and silenced in conversations about health, wellness, and body positivity. Jessica tells us about why if we distill difficulties with food down to just the thin ideal, we end up missing a lot of the complexity of how Black women are told to be figuratively and literally smaller as a matter of survival. We talk about how intuitive eating and rejecting diet culture don't address systemic issues like anti-fatness and anti-blackness. And they perpetuate the idea that we need to find individualistic solutions to systemic and structural violence. We talk about how white supremacy and anti-blackness isn't at the root of diet culture, but how, in Jessica's words, it's the whole damn tree. We talk about Lizzo and respectability, resilience and toxic body positivity, and loads and loads more. 

I think I'm gonna be unpacking this book for a long time to come, and I'm just so grateful to Jessica for writing it and I think as a white person, I mean, my opinion doesn't really matter here, but I feel like it's important to sit with the discomfort and the critiques and reflect on the ways that I've perpetuated some of these harmful systems and narratives. And if you're a white person in this space, whether for personal or professional reasons, you need to get this book and also sit with that discomfort.

So again, It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Stories of Black Women's Bodies, and it's available to pre-order now and it will be out on the 7th of February. The pre-order links are in the show notes. It goes without saying that we talk about themes around anti-blackness and enslavement and anti-fatness. So if you're a black person or a fat person, please take care of yourself if you choose to listen to this conversation.

All right, before we get to today's conversation with Jessica, I just want to share that I'm gonna be running my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop again in February. It will be a 90 minute workshop. Completely online and you will be sent a copy of the recording afterwards to watch back. We'll talk about how kids’ embodiment gets disrupted by diet culture, and what this has to do with feeding. We'll discuss why we need to throw the rule book out of the window and let them have ice cream before broccoli, and how we can help build trust in our kids to get what they need. I'll offer a framework that can help you feel more relaxed about mealtimes, whilst encouraging kids to have autonomy. We'll talk about how providing supportive structure can encourage children to remain in touch with their internal cues for hunger, satisfaction, pleasure, and fullness. And I'll cover how fussy eating develops, and other developmental milestones as well as tools to help support our kids through them. We'll talk about why cutting out sugar and saying things like just another bite can undermine kids' instincts around food, and we'll cover how to talk about food and bodies without harming. You'll be asked to fill out a short questionnaire about your specific situation ahead of time, and I'll try to tailor the content to the audience as much as possible. You'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters download. The workshop is suitable for grownups of kids of all ages, but best probably for kids under 12. Parents, whatever that means to your family, grandparents, teachers, nutrition professionals, and anyone else working with kids are more than welcome to join. It'll be on Tuesday, the 21st of February, also pancake day, that's seven o'clock and it's 15 pounds to join. Full details and booking information is in the show notes and the transcript for this episode.

And just before we get to Jessica, just a quick reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader supported publication and podcast. I'd love to bring you more deeply researched pieces like my piece on clean eating and kids from a couple weeks ago, but it requires a significan...