Author and journalist Virginia Sole-Smith joins us to discuss the allure of wellness approaches for those with chronic pain and illness, her experience navigating endometriosis and migraines in diet and wellness culture, the difficulty of describing pain, the notes of orthorexia and fatphobia that show up in otherwise helpful kid-feeding philosophies, her book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, and more.
Virginia Sole-Smith is the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. As a journalist, she has reported from kitchen tables and grocery stores, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid’s tail. Virginia began her career in women’s magazines, alternatively challenging beauty standards and gender norms, and upholding diet culture through her health, nutrition and fitness reporting. Motherhood inspired a reckoning, and led to her first book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Scientific American and many other publications. Virginia now writes the popular anti-diet newsletter Burnt Toast and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast.
Resources and References
Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Virginia’s new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture
Virginia’s first book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America
Do we really eat “a credit card’s worth of plastic” every week?
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to provide a faithful rendering of this episode, some transcription errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast exploring the Diet, Culture, Disinformation, Dubious Diagnoses and disordered eating that are so pervasive in contemporary Wellness culture and how to avoid falling into these traps so that you can find your own true wellbeing. I'm your host Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietician certified Intuitive Eating counselor, journalist, and author of the books Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019 and The Wellness Trap, which came out on April 25th and is now available wherever books are sold. You can learn more and order it now at ChristyHarrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Hey there. Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is fellow author and journalist Virginia Sole-Smith, who joins me to discuss her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, the allure of Wellness approaches for those with chronic pain and illness, her experience navigating endometriosis and migraines in diet and Wellness culture, the difficulty of describing pain, the notes of orthorexia and fat phobia that show up in otherwise helpful kid feeding philosophies, the problem with dieting dads and more. Before the interview, just a few quick announcements. This podcast is brought to you by my new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, Dubious Diagnoses, and find your true wellbeing, which is now available wherever books are sold. The book explores the connections between diet-culture and wellness culture, how the wellness space became overrun with scams, misinformation and conspiracy theories, why many popular alternative medicine diagnoses are misleading and harmful, and what we can do instead, to create a society that promotes true wellbeing, just go to ChristyHarrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and order the book or just pop into your favorite local bookstore and ask for The Wellness Trap.
If you like this show and want to help support it, I'd be so grateful if you'd subscribe, rate and review it. You can do that wherever you're listening to this. And you can also get it as a newsletter in your inbox every other week where you can either listen to the audio or read a full transcript or both. Subscribe to that at rethinkingwellness.substack.com, and if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you'll get early access to regular episodes plus occasional bonus episodes, including a new one coming out next week. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to learn more and sign up. And now without any further ado, let's go to my conversation with Virginia Sole-Smith. So I'd love to start off by talking about your personal history with wellness culture. You shared with me in a recent conversation on your podcast that you have migraines and endometriosis, which as you've said and as I've seen, are really two conditions that get a lot of wellness industry buzz and can lead people down some rabbit holes. And it sounds like you definitely went on some journeys with trying to manage those things alternatively. So I'm curious to get into some of the details of those wild rides and where you are now in your relationship with wellness approaches to your conditions.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah, so I developed migraines. It was my freshman college orientation was when I had my first aura migraine where I was like, am I having a stroke? What is happening? It's such a disorienting experience for folks who don't have auras. You see flashes of light and in mind everyone's faces look weird, and it's a super disorienting experience, and then it's followed by a day or more of blinding pain and throwing up and all that good stuff. So that started when I was 18, and the medical mainstream medical response was initially just to like, oh, let's try a different birth control pill. Let's try another birth control pill. Let's try another birth control pill. And then to start prescribing various medications. And at this point, this is late 90s, early 2000s, they really did not have a lot of great medications for managing chronic migraines.
So I was being really undertreated by the mainstream medical model. And then the endometriosis, really looking back, I probably had it all the way along, or certainly by the time I was about 14, I always had really debilitating periods, but various hormonal birth controls would kind of keep it at bay for a bit. And then when I was, oh, I don't know, 26, 27, I wanted to get off hormones in part because I was starting to hear all this wellness culture talk that somehow hormonal birth control was shutting off your body's natural cycles and that I was totally being controlled by this pill in a way that felt wrong for someone who was trying to eat organic and do a lot of yoga at that point. And I didn't want to be so dependent on it. So I switched to a non-hormonal IUD for my birth control, and that's when my endometriosis just came out full.
I mean, I was really, really chronically ill for several years. I would have ovarian cysts that would rupture periodically throughout my cycle. My periods were incredibly, we're talking vomiting, can't stand up straight pain, and the migraines were also exacerbating and sort of tandem with that. So there were several years where I just felt at war with my body. I felt like every day it was like, will I be able to work? Will I be able to function or am I going to spend the day lying on the couch watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns because that's like all I can handle. And mainstream medicine didn't have a lot for me on these fronts. It was like, take Advil, use a heating pad, things that were not, and I felt very dismissed by a lot of doctors. So that did push me towards exploring more wellness approaches.
And I tried acupuncture, chiropractors, oh gosh, what else? Different diet elimination, diet type things. None of it ever made anything better, more than maybe it's working this month and then the next month things are bad again. It never felt like we were moving the needle on anything. And ultimately, I was spending a lot of extra money. I mean, I remember definitely trying to do a lot of yoga and I think yoga's great, but yoga to manage chronic pain conditions, it's not going to be a total silver bullet by any means. And then getting into stuff, what was it called? Feldenkrais or these different, the Alexander technique, all these different variation zone chiropractor work when body movement stuff. And a lot of that also made me really anxious about my weight because the people who offer those services tend to be very thin willowy women who have beautiful posture.
And so I was very fixated on my weight being somehow the problem because I didn't have the body that matched up with the body that they have by living this life. So it was all very tangled for me in anxiety about weight and anxiety, about these health conditions, even though my weight had absolutely nothing, I mean nothing to do with my migraines and my endometriosis. These are conditions I've had from the time I was a thin teenager on through being a small fat adult. It's there's no relationship there. But that was where I put a lot of energy. So trying detoxes, spending a lot of money on these things. The acupuncture in particular was crazy expensive and not covered by insurance at that point. Ultimately what happened was I ended up having surgery for the endometriosis, which brought me a couple of months of relief.
And so this is again where I'm, Western medicine wasn't that great either because I had four months of feeling really good after the surgery and then my cysts returned, which is what happens with a lot of folks with that surgery. And then I was very lucky, it's very common for folks with endometriosis. I had stage four, which is a pretty severe level. It's very common at that level to have infertility struggles. And I was able to conceive the old-fashioned way and have my first daughter. And that pregnancy actually shifted something in my hormones and both conditions became more manageable. And then after she was born, I went on the mirena IUD, which has a low dose of hormones and manages to completely control my endometriosis for the most part, and discovered there's a new class of injectable migraine drugs that have worked really well for me.
And I think those two mainstream medical interventions combined with age and other body changes have led me to be in a much more stable place for the past eight years or so. And it is frustrating to look back and see how many things I was chasing because of these failures by both systems. The doctors, the drug that ended up working for me with migraines wasn't even on the market or approved back then, so they didn't have the right options, but they also didn't have the empathy or the compassion or it felt like the curiosity to try to figure out what was going on. And then the wellness folks were presenting with lots of empathy and curiosity. I felt seen and I felt heard by them in a way that the doctors weren't, but they had no effective tools. It was spending lots of money on things that were not doing anything and were often creating more stress for me, because it was expensive, because it was time away from work to go to these long appointments. I had to travel to find people. And because of that added layer of the body size stuff coming into play.
Christy Harrison: That's so interesting. And I feel like so common for people who have chronic illness, chronic pain, chronic conditions of any kind. I definitely went through that myself of feeling more supported and empathized with by various alternative spaces that I found myself in and feeling dismissed by the Western healthcare system. And it didn't have great solutions for me. And so it does make it so attractive, but when the things that they're offering as solutions are not actually effective, that can really be discouraging for so many people. I mean, what was it like for you when you recognized that the wellness approaches weren't working?
Virginia Sole-Smith: I just felt really hopeless, and it felt like it was really hard to imagine a relationship with my body that wasn't combative because it felt like there were no options for me. If the mainstream doctors were being sort of dismissive, I can remember going in really acute pain and them saying, what is your pain level? And on that one to 10 scale, and me being a 10 and the doctor was like, no, at 10 you'd be passed out, so you're obviously not at a 10. And it was like, okay, I don't know what to do if you're just going to deny what I'm telling you, I'm feeling I don't know where we go with that conversation. And then on the flip side, getting this sort of compassionate support from folks who were also though selling me expensive protocols. And there's a kind of gaslighting that happens there where I would be aware on one level that we're not really making progress. I'm still missing work. I'm still experiencing however many pain days a month. And yet they're looking for like, oh, but it seems like the onset was 15 minutes faster, slower, or you're saying, so it was the same kind of thing of actually dismissing me where the doctor's doing it in a more sort of blunt way maybe of that's not your pain level, but they're sort of looking for markers of success that they can convince me something's working when I know nothing is working.
Christy Harrison: That's such an important point. I feel like I see that a lot with people who are trying functional medicine approaches or integrative medicine where they're doctors looking at these esoteric labs or sort of nontraditional interpretations of standard labs and being like, but your inflammation levels are coming down or whatever.
Virginia Sole-Smith: What does that even mean?
Christy Harrison: Right, exactly. There's no real standard way to assess that. And then also looking at things through this lens of inflammation or through this lens of food, supposed food intolerance or something being like, well, of course you're going to have pain. Someone from the book told me, their doctor said, of course you're going to have pain because your whole system is inflamed, so this is just what it is to live with chronic inflammation. And it turned out they also had a raging case of endometriosis that was causing unbearable pain.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah, it's not just mysterious inflammation. It's quite concrete. We can see it on ultrasounds all over.
Christy Harrison: And there was literally a growth protruding from their abdomen, which is why they finally were taken seriously. And it's like that's what it has to be for so many people to actually get that kind of attention sometimes in, I mean, definitely in mainstream healthcare, but also sometimes in alternative healthcare as well.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Definitely. And I think back to what I had those debilitating awful periods as a 12- and 13-year-old, and that I was basically being told by doctors then, well, this is just having your period. This is just your body. This is just being a woman, and what a terrible insidious message to be embedding in a child in their understanding of their body, that pain is just part of it, and you're going to have to accept these intense pain days, and this is just normal for you. As opposed to, oh, I mean, no one was looking at a 13 year old and saying, does she have endometriosis? Which it feels like a pretty major thing to have missed and then continue to miss. And we know with endometriosis that it takes, I don't know, nine to 11 years to get diagnosed most of the time because exactly of that, because we're so dismissive of women's pain and girls' pain.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Well, and I think it goes to something that you alluded to earlier too, of the difficulty of communicating pain or having a sort of standard to talk about pain. You linked to a great piece in your newsletter recently from The Guardian that we'll post in the show notes, that's an excerpt from a book about endometriosis and this difficulty of communicating pain. And the author said that the difficulty of conveying what a nine or a 10 meant to her versus what the doctor has in mind, because you experienced too, the doctor's like, well, you'd be passed out because maybe the doctor's frame of reference is people who've been severely injured or who are hospitalized or that have this level of pain that's not sort of something that someone could be walking around with every day.
Virginia Sole-Smith: But she hadn't explained that to me. She wasn't like a 10 is, you know, have bones protruding from your body from a horrific car accident. And then I would've been like, oh, a seven, I guess there was no examples. It was just like, give me your pain scale. And I was like, well, this is what my pain, I know I can't lift my head off the pillow. I know I can't stand up straight. I know I'm vomiting like this. I don't know how to characterize this for you. Yeah.
Christy Harrison: And when that's the highest level of pain you've experienced in your life, then it's a 10 on your scale. From my whole fertility journey, I had complications with IVF with the egg retrieval. I ended up being hospitalized after the egg retrieval. It was a whole thing. And at first it was kind of the same thing. I was like, I'm in extreme pain, please help me. And the doctor on call was like, okay, well try to manage it at home, hot water bottles, this and that. And I was like, now it's radiating to my shoulder. Now I can't move.
Virginia Sole-Smith: I feel like this is more than a hot water bottle situation. Yeah, okay.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And I've since learned that this particular way that it was radiating to my shoulder is a hallmark of internal bleeding. And that's turned out what I had. It took multiple calls over increasing levels of desperation to kind of finally have that doctor be like, okay, this can be a sign of internal bleeding. Maybe you should go to the ER. But at first he was, even if you can just hold out for two more hours, we're opening at six if you can come in right when we open, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, it was 4:30 in the morning or something. And I was like, I have to go. No, no. And thank God we went to the ER and I got help and I was hospitalized for a couple of days while they figured out what was going on. But in that time, it was like that was now my new 10. I had never experienced anything remotely similar to that. My 10 before was maybe half that or a third that or whatever. So it readjusted my threshold for pain.
Virginia Sole-Smith: One of my children, I delivered vaginally without an epidural. So I have a clear sense of what a 10 is. And I will say my endometriosis pain was on par with that 10. It was the same. It was the same. So I remember when I was in labor being, I mean, I'm not excited to be experiencing this, but I know this pain, this is not unfamiliar to me. And so again, this dismissal of yeah, everyone is entitled to their own individual 10 and also anyone's 10 is terrible. And by a lot of objective measurements we could use for pain. You had pain off the charts. I had pain off the charts. It should have been being taken much more seriously.
Christy Harrison: Totally. I mean, I think about the sort of common knowledge that childbirth is one of the most excruciating things anyone can go through. And the fact that you were experiencing that level of pain from endometriosis on a monthly basis, and nobody took that seriously is so upsetting. And the people who were taking it seriously were do this cleanse or try this.
Virginia Sole-Smith: The people who had the empathy didn't have answers. They had things to sell me. And body anxiety is to let you know, they were very focused. So the other thing that is common with endometriosis is weight fluctuations because depending on what all the different lesions and sits are doing, your weight and your shape of your abdomen changes very dramatically. And so that was what they would zero in on. And looking back, it was disconcerting for me where I was in my relationship with my body, but it was the pain that was the problem. The body shape was not the problem. So it was just interesting that that was kind of where people's focus went. I mean, it makes total sense given the way wellness culture works and the way diet-culture works, but that was what I fixated on as well at that point because it was like that was a thing that I could show people. I could show them pictures of my taken sideways of my abdomen on different days. And it was really clear in a way that me describing my experience of pain was not apparently clear enough to people.
Christy Harrison: That's so interesting. And the fact that the weight bias is just so baked into that experience and really weight wellness culture, I think just kind of incorporates the values of diet-culture wholesale and then adds more of its own that are really problematic as well. But the diet-culture is very much baked in. So even if they're not saying they're not, your weight is causing this or your weight is the problem, it's there under the surface.
Virginia Sole-Smith: That's what they'll respond to. Oh, you're right. Your abdomen is really distended on those days. Okay, yeah, how many pounds extra fluid or whatever. And it's like that's not maybe mildly medically interesting, but it's not the story. It's not the thing we need to change. I mean, I remember even when I had my surgery, the doctor told me how many pounds he removed from me. I would be really delighted by that information of that's how much endometriosis he took out. And I just remember being, I just feel like we're focused on the wrong thing. That's not what I came here to do, but this is where we are.
Christy Harrison: So by that point, you were already questioning the whole diet culture operation.
Virginia Sole-Smith: I wasn't fully to my big turning point moments, but I was both frustrated that that was such a focus and also buying. And I remember feeling like I was sort of disturbed he told me that. And also like, oh, okay, I guess that's good. I guess that's a sign that it worked if my weight dropped or whatever. It was very convoluted and there was a lot of back-and-forth thing for me at that point.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious, kind of connecting that to your work with kids and kid feeding, your experience with your daughter Violet that you wrote about in your first book and sort of the medical trauma that she went through and having to learn how to help her eat in way that was more connected. And it seems like that really helped you get past diet-culture, the Satter division of responsibility approach. And so now as a person who's rooted in an anti-diet stance, you're starting to see and question some of the layers of fat phobia that maybe are still apparent in that model. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that, the nuances of how that model can be really helpful for feeding kids and the fat phobia that's still baked in harmful and problematic.
Virginia Sole-Smith: So the experience with Violet that I wrote about in The Eating Instinct is that she was born with a rare congenital heart condition. She stopped eating at one month when she went into heart failure, which is a logical coping strategy for a baby in heart failure. But then even once we had come out of the intense emergency piece of the crisis and were then on this journey of multiple heart surgeries, but she's medically stable, she couldn't eat, and she was dependent on a feeding tube. And so we were in this very unusual situation of everything I thought I knew about being a good mom, especially a good mom of a baby, really boiled down to like, I will breastfeed and then I will make my own baby food and I will do this whole perfect feeding a baby thing. And none of that was available.
She couldn't nurse, she couldn't take a bottle. She was dependent on a tube. So we had a very different trajectory and that was terrible and traumatic in many ways. But a silver lining of it is that it really forced me to step outside the paradigm of everything I thought I knew about how we should eat, what healthy eating looks like and just realize how much I'd been looking for roles and plans and answers from other people, and that in fact we were going to have to figure this out on our own. And in the process of that, yes, I found Ellen Satter's division of responsibility, which was a real liberation moment for me. I really can't underscore that enough because it was the first time, I'd found a framework that said, you are not responsible for making your child eat. Because the bedrock of division of responsibility is that parents are in charge of offering food and offering plenty of good nourishing food, like enough food for your child throughout the day, but that the child is in charge of weather and how much they eat at every meal.
And of course, we had a baby on a feeding tube, we weren't going to take away the feeding tube. We were sort of supplementing division of responsibility by making sure she got calories since she was in a place where she wouldn't eat at all by mouth. But it meant it took so much pressure off because it was like, okay, I'm doing my job. I'm showing up with the feeding tube and then anything else we're doing is it can be more on her own terms. We can give her time to get there. And it's not me trying to shove food in her mouth, it's me giving her opportunities to explore and play with food on her own terms. So it was revolutionary for us, and that really helped me trust Violet and trust myself and work us towards a pretty good relationship with food and to really start to dismantle a lot of my beliefs about diet-culture in the process.
But what I came up against fairly quickly once we moved out of that acute stage and I had a preschooler and then an elementary school kid and then a second daughter who had a very typical eating trajectory, and I'm just now in the daily grind, of feeding children all the time. What I came up against then was the ways in which division of responsibility didn't quite answer every question, and in fact sometimes felt like more pressure. There are rules. So one example is the framework includes that parents are in charge of when food is offered, which means in between meals and snacks, you say the kitchen is closed and you just trust that the kid can power through that and they can come to the table hungry at the next eating opportunity. But I'm here to say, if you've had a kid who couldn't or wouldn't eat, and now that kid is saying to you, I'm hungry, it feels wrong in your body on a cellular level to say the kitchen is closed.
And I've talked to parents of kids whose older kids who've had restrictive eating disorders and they say the same thing, I will never again say no to a kid who says they're hungry because they never want to deny that knowledge of their own hunger. And then it gets really complicated because kids learn to say, I'm hungry as a bargaining chip. They don't always mean they're hungry. Of course there's a whole personality thing happening and sometimes it's, I'm hungry because I'm trying to stall bedtime or there's different ways it comes up and you have to sort of sus that out. But there would be times I would just realize; I'm trying to serve dinner at 5:30 and these kids are ready for dinner at four 30. And so for me to be like, no food for you for the next hour doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel right.
It doesn't feel like I'm honoring them. It doesn't feel like I'm letting them listen to their bodies. Of course we're going to have a snack even if it means they don't eat much dinner, this is fine. And that's a pretty mild example. But when we start to look at how this being in charge of when, let's consider that in a family with neurodivergent kids maybe who are on medication that suppress appetite during the school day, maybe who are just have a little bit harder time registering satiety cues or those cues are very intense for them in different ways. Often the schedule to feeding those kids has to look different than three meals and two snacks or whether three meals and three snacks, and there has to be more flexibility and parents need to feel more empowered to make these calls. And so there's another way in which the framework is actually somewhat ableist in that it's sort of ignoring those nuances.
And what I really came down to is realizing that as great and liberating as this framework was, I was also still doing that thing I'd always done of needing to find an external source to explain needing to me. I was still doing that looking for answers with someone else, and this was a very useful framework, but I can absolutely see how if you are still very firmly in diet-culture, it can be deployed in ways that are super restrictive. And so if you are in charge of what food is offered, but you are scared to let your kids eat sugar, then you're not going to offer sugar. And so then your kids are going to be fixated on the foods that they're not getting. So there's a lot of nuance there, and I think the framework does a good job of, to some extent, encouraging parents to work through that diet-culture stuff. But also there's this sort of ethos around it, and this doesn't just come from Satter. This comes with how it's marketed on Instagram with kid food, Instagram and dieticians and all sorts of folks where if you are still feeling like it's not working, it must be because you're doing something wrong. And that again, just feels like another diet-culture thing to me.
Christy Harrison: And also the examples of foods that are given in that space, kid food, Instagram interpretation of Satter's, division of responsibility can be so,
Virginia Sole-Smith: Oh yeah, it's the rainbow Bento boxes, five kinds of produce for lunch. No child needs to eat four kinds of produce in one meal. I don't eat four kinds of produce the most meal. What are we doing?
Christy Harrison: No, it seems very extravagant to do that actually.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes, and expensive and a lot of food waste. There's a lot of privilege involved in being able to do division of responsibility and be okay with the food waste that comes from it. They'll say, oh, we'll just serve small portions and let them add on, but it's inevitable you're going to have food waste doing this and that doesn't feel safe or for a lot of people. So I think in that way it's not entirely trauma informed or sort of sensitive to those different pressures. And I think it doesn't directly ask parents to reckon with their own anti-fat bias and how that is underpinning how they think about feeding kids. That's another core piece of it. I think for me, I discovered it as I was doing that work and it sort of led me to doing that work more fully. Not that I think we're ever fully unlearned in our biases, but that has been a big focus in my work since. But I think for lots of folks, this is, and we see this with Intuitive Eating as well, this is where you start and stop. And so if you haven't also worked through your feelings around your child's body size or your fears about their future body size, then you are going to continue to deploy this method in a way that still has that underlying goal of I'm trying to have them have a healthy relationship with food so they'll stay thin. And then you're always putting a problematic contingency on it.
Christy Harrison: And so that leads nicely into discussing your book, which is called Fat Talk Parenting in the Age of diet-culture. And I think you do a great job in the book of making that connection between these well-intentioned ideas that parents might want to use to feed their kids, and then the reality that is so influenced and inflected by anti-fat bias and how that sort of twists these helpful frameworks or potentially helpful, largely helpful frameworks into something that can just be reinforcing of diet-culture.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean this really came out of, as I was talking to folks about The Eating Instinct and starting to hear from readers, and a lot of them were parents, I was hearing over and over how desperately parents want their kids to have a better relationship with food. I think particularly millennial parents, we know what we went through in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. We don't want to replicate that for our children. There was a thing on Instagram just yesterday showing a clip from Full House where Aunt Becky gives DJ diet tips and it's horrifying to be like, oh my gosh, we all watched that on a Friday night. And she's like, just have broiled fish and blah, blah blah. And it's like, Lord, this was just normal. And DJ's like, thanks Aunt Becky. Like, oh, skin crawling. Anyway, so we know where we came from.
We don't want that, but we don't know what to replace it with. And we also, a lot of us really fear the idea that we would have a fat kid, we're afraid of what that would say about us and our parenting, we're afraid about what that would mean for their future health and happiness and how they'll be treated by peers. And that may be rooted in some very real stuff because we know that fat people are treated worse in a lot of, I mean in pretty much all of the ways. So we're not wrong. The system is stacked against us, but if we can't in our own hearts and in our own homes unconditionally accept our kids' bodies, whatever size they are, if we're always putting conditions around who gets to have a healthy relationship with food and who gets to love our bodies, we're not going to move past the Aunt Becky of it all. We're going to be right there still.
Christy Harrison: It also ties into something we've talked about a lot for your first book and on your podcast and my podcast about this food environment piece, the sort of Michael Pollan point of view that I think so many millennial parents have gotten caught up in or that was very formative for many of us, I think at least for you and me, it was. And this notion that you were talking about of it's being a good parent, having a good eater means to breastfeed means to make your own baby food that's doing it “right”. And I think it intersects with these notions of the food environment being toxic and endocrine disruptors in the environment, making kids fat supposedly, and all this messaging that sort of feels progressive in some way, that it's looking at systems, looking at the influence of industry and relationships between industry and government and uncovering these seeming nefarious ties that are doing damage to people. But it's framed through this lens of anti-fat bias. It's like, this is bad because it's making people fat. This is bad because it's making our kids fat and creating “childhood obesity”. And it's just so insidious, right? Because I think people are thinking that again, that they're doing the right thing and looking at things from a food systems perspective, but the fat phobia that's baked into that is so toxic in and of itself.
Virginia Sole-Smith: I think that Pollan and all those folks, Mark Bittman and Mary Nestle and sort of all those leading mid 2000s voices on this, I think they made a fairly, I would argue, a fairly conscious choice of it is hard to get people to care about migrant farm workers' conditions. It is hard to get people to care about environmental issues they can't see immediately in front of them, but it is not hard to get people to care about their weight because they already do. So if we can connect all of this to weight, then we can get America's attention. And if we can say, this is part of fighting the war on obesity, then we can really galvanize the troops, so to speak. And I just think that's where we then added this other layer of being a moral socially responsible person to thinness. So it's not just about health, it's about your duty to the environment, it's part of being a good liberal, it's part of being a woke person.
And we're ignoring the fact that in theory, people who subscribe to liberalism or wokeness or whatever you want to call it, also value people's individual rights and body autonomy. And this is a framework that completely denies that. So there's a real disconnect there, but it's fascinating how baked in it still is and how much, so many people have a hard time letting go of that. I often get Intuitive Eating, but what about processed foods? Surely not there shortly not do you think we can? I think they feel like surely there comes a point where it's not okay to accept this body because you've given up on these other values and it couldn't be further from the truth. And a lot of what they're pushing is not evidence-based, it is not supported by the science. I was doing a podcast interview earlier this week, this will have aired by the time we do this, so whatever. I'm just going to throw it under the bus where the host was all there with me on like, yes, yes. Fat phobia is so terrible. It's so terrible how we treat the children. And she was like, well, it's not like it's their fault American. The average American eats a credit card worth of plastic every week. And I was like, I mean, that's just not true.
But she wanted to say it's the environment, it's the chemicals in the environment making us fat so we shouldn't be mean to fat people because it's not their fault because of the environment. And I was like, even if there was any truth to that, you're not doing fat people the favor you think you are by pushing that kind of lack of evidence theory. That's not actually removing any of the barriers I'm talking about. That's sort of continuing to other, because she feels like she's escaping this because she's so smart and informed about these issues. So she's presumably not consuming the plastic somehow that the rest of us are just mindlessly eating. But that's, so it's still playing into this clear hierarchy of who is exposed to these things.
Christy Harrison: Well, and it's also like it's not dismantling any of the preexisting fat phobia that was there in the first place. It's just adding onto it. So it's like a landfill. It's building on this foundation of yuckiness. It's already there and just piling more and more stuff on top. So it's creating a bigger structure.
But I think that goes back to what we were talking about before about the desperation. So many people feel around their health and issues that they've had with chronic illness or pain in the healthcare system not being taken seriously. And it's the fact that they were so desperate and Wellness culture was there for them. And I think in some cases for some people, I mean, my experience was that when I first was dabbling in elimination diets, I was like, oh, this is it. This is working. This is making me feel better. And then over time I was like, is it though, in my heart of hearts, I really don't know, but I'm still going to tell people because now I have everyone in my life on board to make me gluten free stuff and asking me how it's going and whatever. So I'm going to still say that it's working, but actually,
Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah, that's a hard piece of it. People get really invested in your journey with you and it's hard to, I remember that. Yeah, it's hard to be like, yeah, this isn't it either. It's still terrible. I, and I think that just speaks to we're uncomfortable with people being sick and in pain. We don't have a framework for accepting disability or disease in a chronic way. And so we want there to be answers. And so we want there to be fixes.
Christy Harrison: And it's so understandable, I think for people who are going through it themselves to want that, but then I think people can get so dug in when it's like, well, this is working for me or this is the thing. Because maybe the thing that's working for you is the empathy. You said, you know, were finding the empathy in those alternative spaces. That was true for me. That's true for so many people I talk to. That's where the empathy is a lot of the time. Not that it can't be found in conventional healthcare. I have some wonderfully empathetic providers now, but it's like it's taken a long time to find a full team of providers who are really empathetic. It might have been here or there in the past in the conventional system versus when you go to acupuncture, when you go to yoga or when you go to a naturopath or something.
It's like that empathy is kind of there, right there. It feels like much more freely offered. And so I think that is something that people can kind of react to as well when they feel like their worldview with wellness culture is under attack when it's like somebody's debunking their favorite theory. Because I think there's things like that myth of we eat a credit card's worth of plastic or whatever that feel like, okay, this is giving me something to hold onto. This is giving me something. Maybe the person who transmitted that message to me has helped me in other ways or seems like they've helped me in other ways. And so attacking that message is attacking the person. And so there's so much tied up in it. I think there's so many reasons for holding onto these beliefs, but just starting to untangle that and look at reasons why what you're believing might not be entirely true. And I like to ask people, does this really feel like it's working or do you feel like it was working for a while? And then maybe that kind of wore off? Because I think that's a common phenomenon with a placebo effect. It's very strong and it can have literal pain relief effects at the beginning even long term. But I think over time that sort of wears off for a lot of people. And then it's like, okay, maybe this is not what it was cracked up to be.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Definitely that tracks with my experience and also what I've seen in my reporting for sure.
Christy Harrison: There's so many directions we can go. And I definitely want to circle back to talk about your book more, but as we're talking, and this will be old news by the time this comes out, but as we're talking, Gwyneth Paltrow has been very much in the news leading almond mom. She's like always got some restrictive eating habit or weird wellness plan that she's touting. And so it's not really, really super newsy, but she was just in the news recently because she detailed this very restrictive wellness practice or routine that she supposedly does. And this is like to be expected from her. And also as you and I have both acknowledged in various ways, I think we see that that is a part of the business model. And she literally says that in the podcast episode that this whole flap was about. She says, towards the end of that episode, controversy is part of the business model putting out there these things that people love to jump on and attack. Oh my God, that's so restrictive or that's so woo woo and out there and there's no evidence is what brings eyeballs and clicks to her media empire. And I think it's no coincidence probably that the podcast host whose podcast she did, who's a good friend of hers and her doctor by the way, which is also a weird dual relationship.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Oh yeah.
Christy Harrison: That is actually a triple relationship because her company Goop Press just published his book.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Lord, yes.
Christy Harrison: The controversy being the business model actually makes a lot of sense when you look at it that way. But I think there's something larger even there too. And I was trying to think about whether there's a way to write about this eloquently and haven't come up with it yet, but she's talking to this doctor who's a functional medicine practitioner and she's talking about how he's done all this testing on her and put her on these different protocols and she's mostly paleo and does this and that and all these other practices like dry brushing and a sauna and stuff like that. And he's like right there, cosigning it all with her. And I think there's something with the functional medicine space in particular and integrative and alternative practices to a point where there's like this emphasis on testing, getting to the root cause, the root cause of the problem that really helps people feel like so seen and cared for. Even if it's just going around in circles for years and years and years,
Virginia Sole-Smith: It feels like you're getting answers and you've had these symptoms that feel inexplicable and are so distressing and painful and you just want to know. I think people want to know why. And so they think they're getting to some truth and they're usually not getting anywhere near a truth.
Christy Harrison: And the connection to diet-culture is so interesting too because I think in a lot of those spaces, the solution is largely food related. It's cut out all these foods, take these supplements, maybe increase certain foods, but largely it's like taking food away is the path to healing. And I think that just is so understandable for a system that is built on such a foundation of diet-culture and anti-fat bias and the anti-black racism that underlies all that, right? It's of course taking out food is going to be the solution that's touted.
Virginia Sole-Smith: No, I think that's right. I think it's really rooted in the sort of puritanical restriction that our country is founded on and the racism. And I think that again, it feels very actionable and concrete and it's also what most of us were already doing because most people are active participants in diet-culture before they get maybe diet-culture and wellness culture's always been kind of tangled together. But before you get to the functional medicine doctor level of testing your pee and your blood and doing all that, you've probably already been on some kind of restrictive diet for at least a hot minute in your life. And so there's a familiarity to it as well of right, I know. I have been told this is what solves everything.
Christy Harrison: It sort of ties into this discussion you have in your book of dieting dads, which I think will probably resonate with a lot of listeners. You found in your research that men are the most likely to perpetuate anti-fat bias, but also this sort of performance of dieting and avoiding foods that their kids are bringing into the house. Peter Attia is an example you use in the book, but I think there are so many, probably dads like this, but he's this functional slash alternative wellness person who's really, it's like the biohacking section of wellness culture that he is all about. And it's this idea that you can be sort of a machine and finally control what goes into your body and calibrate it precisely through all this testing and monitoring. And you talk in the book about how he posts photos of and enlists his followers for “accountability” of foods that his kids bring into the house and does a hashtag denied hashtag avoided. Look at me. I'm so good for avoiding this food, right?
Virginia Sole-Smith: Food his wife is making for their kids. I mean, his kids are little, they're not grocery shopping. His wife is making them mac and cheese or putting out, giving them veggie straws as snacks. And he's like, look at my willpower resisting this. And it's so interesting because the other thing about the Gwyneth debacle is, of course the internet freaks out when Gwyneth tells us about her crazy diet, but the internet doesn't freak out about Peter Attia. And I mean, I know he's not as giant of a household name, but it doesn't freak out about any of the men who do these things because we give a gravitas to men about food and diet that we don't give to women. We assume that when a female celebrity is doing some elaborate lifestyle thing for weight loss, it's vanity, it's Kim Kardashian, it's Gwyneth, it's this sort of very, whoa, this is an eating disorder.
This is so messed up. And then what he's talking about, he follows an intermittent fasting protocol and then he really wants to eat his kids mac and cheese. Of course he does. He's been deprived even when he is eating, when he is not fasting, he has all these rules about what he's allowed to eat. So it's not surprising that he then finds his kids food very tempting because he is probably hungry. This is what an eating disorder therapist or dietician would absolutely classify as a red flag, but it's never questioned because he is a man of science. He is very built and articulate and manly in the way he talks about these things. And so he gets this credibility when he's really pushing habits that are just as dangerous. And when folks are, we worry about folks emulating Gwyneth, I worry about folks emulating this guy because it's just as destructive, the eating habits.
And so I think there's some real interesting double standards and misogyny at work there in terms of who we listen to in the foods and wellness space and who becomes kind of a stereotype or a joke of themselves, even though of course she's also profiting tremendously off this. But the thing is, is it doesn't just like it's obnoxious to see a woman dismissed, but I mean, I'm not going to stand here and be like, we should listen to Gwyneth Paltrow more. She's not who I'm worried about. But what it really does is it under serves people of all genders because it means that men who are struggling with food and body image stuff or struggling with any of these issues, they don't have a script to talk about it. They don't have the language. We're not giving men the tools to say, I hate my body and I feel bad about it, and I need to talk about the anti-fat bias I've experienced. They're given the Peter Attia script of muscle through, have willpower, do your research, be really hardcore about it, and it'll all work itself out. And that's truly terrifying. I mean, that's really doing nobody any favors. And then it's particularly dangerous when we're talking about households where these men are fathers, and so this is what they're modeling to their kids about what a healthy relationship with food looks like.
Christy Harrison: What do you think people can do? I know you've written in your newsletter and talked about how to approach the dads, how to approach the husbands, how to approach the partners who are caught up in diet culture and maybe transmitting this stuff to their kids.
Virginia Sole-Smith: I mean, it's hard because on the one hand, especially if we're talking about heterosexual relationships, I'm really aware that women are already socialized to carry so much of this water. We are socialized to be the ones who feed kids to do more of the meal planning. And that also means that we're more likely to have encountered something like division of responsibility or Intuitive Eating and be a little further along in this work because we're on Instagram furiously researching what to do about picky eaters. And a lot of the husbands are not doing that same research or doing that same learning.
Christy Harrison: Or they're doing the learning of listening to Peter Attia and learning how to intermittent fast and biohack and stuff.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah. So they're not encountering the counter narrative, but they're also not even doing the work of grocery shopping and figuring out what's for dinner half the time. So I just want to acknowledge that it's like this is our starting point. We have to figure out how to open the doors to these conversations with men. And also it's annoying to me that we have to, because here's another thing women get to fix. Cool. So just want to articulate that. But that being said, I do think it's really important that if you're co-parenting with cis man, you do open the door to these conversations because it is so dangerous to just let that framework live for so many reasons. And this might look like sharing your own, if it feels safe and you know, have good communication like sharing. This is why it's so important to me personally, not to transmit diet-culture and wellness culture to our kids.
This is how I've struggled because of it. And really explaining how it has harmed you and why you don't want to replicate that harm with your children, I think is important. And also making a space where you're not critiquing or sort of picking on your husband for these belief systems, but maybe trying to give him a space to talk about why it feels so necessary. Why does it feel so important that you have to hashtag avoided on the donuts when we bought donuts? Because it's a Saturday morning, and that's a nice thing to do with our family. Why is it so critical that you cannot mix a workout? And so our family's entire weekend schedule revolves around when you're going to do your bike ride for your Ironman training. Why is this so critical to your sense of your identity? What need are you not having met here?
Is this really the way to meet those needs and to serve that? And just creating more space for men to talk about the emotions around food. It was fascinating reporting that chapter, how literally I am on calls with these guys because I'm like, I would like to talk to you about your emotional relationship with food and your body. And they couldn't talk about emotions. They would pivot those questions. They would tell me facts, they would tell me their histories, but they really struggled to say how it felt. And it just really underscored to me that men need more vocabulary for talking about the feelings, the experiences they've had of weight-based teasing, of bullying around if they were the fat kid, if their dad was hard on them or had really high expectations of them as athletes. All of that we need to make a space to talk about.
And then I guess the last thing I would say is if that work is not accessible right now, either because of your relationship with this person, or they're so sort of entrenched in this stuff that they're like, yeah, no, I'm not giving up the Ironman training. I'm not going to eat carbs. If that's where they are, I think you need to be able to say, we need to find some common ground in terms of our shared values around how we're feeding the kids, and we need to agree. The diet talk can't come to the table, the body shaming can't come to the table. We need to have some ground rules for how we're going to engage on this with the kids, because this might be something you need to do for yourself. But we have all this research that shows how harmful this is to kids to grow up marinating in this environment, and they don't deserve that. And so figuring out where you can draw those lines, it's hard. This is very hard work and hard conversations.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, extremely hard because it gets at so much deep stuff that so many people haven't really looked at. I know before I started doing this work as a dietician, I had thought about it myself because of my own history with food, my own disordered relationship with food, but never really done the work. I didn't even feel safe bringing it into therapy for years until I'd been with my therapist dealing with other issues for years. So I get how hard that is to sort of open the door and it may take time. So yeah, giving it time and taking a long view kind of approach, but doing what you can. I like what you said about doing what you can to keep it away from the table and away from the kids as much as possible to preserve their relationships with food. What are some other strategies or ideas you have for parents maybe who are listening to this, who or who've read your book and are realizing that their own difficult relationship with food may have bled over into how they fed their kids and maybe are feeling shame for that or having a hard time kind of reckoning with that.
What would you say are some ways they can both take care of themselves and start to shift the relationship with food around the house and with their kids?
Virginia Sole-Smith: Well, first, definitely give yourself grace because I mean, nobody comes into parenthood with this stuff worked out. That's extremely rare. Extremely rare. Christy, you may be the exception to that one.
Christy Harrison: I know I was just saying on your podcast that I feel like I was so lucky to have that.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes, yes.
Christy Harrison: But I also had my first kid at 40, so you know,
Virginia Sole-Smith: You had some time, you put in some work.
Christy Harrison: Had a couple decades.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah, this is your profession, et cetera. But most people do not come into parenthood, but this stuff worked out. So give yourself some grace. This is really hard. This is really deep stuff. It's not going to just sort of all fly out of your family culture just because you read my book, read Christy's book, whatever and are like, great, I don't want this anymore. It's hard. That being said, I think there are a couple sort of small steps I think looking at can we set some, we don't shame bodies here. We don't make fat jokes here. We don't talk negatively about any particular food or any particular body. Just as a family culture, can we say that that is a value that we're all striving for? We don't have to get it perfect all the time, but that's our goal. That can go a long way.
Another one is if there's a scale in your house, can it not be in your house anymore? Because that is definitely a tool that is probably not doing you any favors. And certainly if your kids start engaging with it, that can cause a lot of harm. So just deciding to be a scale free house, if that feels accessible to you. Again, this might be stuff that you need to work with a therapist to get to the point of being able to do, but I think it's a nice concrete goal for folks to think about. The other thing that came up a lot in my reporting is parents of older kids where they did it the diet-culture way for a few years or even a decade, they were really controlling around sugar. They required broccoli to be eaten before you get dessert. They talk negatively about bodies, et cetera, et cetera.
They were able, there's several stories in the book of parents who were able to change that narrative simply. I mean, not simply through lots of hard work and time, but the starting point was saying to their kids, I think I got this wrong and I think you deserve better, and I want to trust you. I want to trust your body and I want to trust you, and I want our home to be your body's safe space. And that is not an easy conversation to have at all. But I think being able to offer that to your kid is a starting point and say, I want to do some things differently. I want to give you more access to foods you haven't felt like you could eat. I want to let you be more in charge of your hunger and when you need to eat and things like that.
And let's think about what that would look like. And then knowing that your kid is not going to trust it right away, your kid is probably going to really gravitate towards the foods that have been restricted. That may be hard for you, but that's an important part of the process. And there may be ways that it feels like you're going backwards a lot, but really articulating your desire to change things. I think I saw a lot of relief from kids when their parents did that. And the other thing is when I talk to adults about their own stuff with food and body, it's pretty clear that their parents not being able to admit that they got it wrong. It continues to be a source of stress. One of the number one questions I get from readers is How do I get my mom who's now 65 and I'm 40 or whatever, how do I get my mom to stop talking about this stuff? Why is my mom still so obsessed with dieting? And there's so many reasons. Boomers had a really rough route, diet-culture was not kind to them. There's a lot there, but from the position of the adult child, it's still a real source of stress that their body still doesn't feel safe around their parent. And so if you want something different, you can start making it different.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think that's so huge. And I feel like the people I've spoken to who have either had that conversation with their kids or were lucky enough to have a parent who had that conversation with them, I think it really does open up space for a different possibility, for different way of being. And yeah, like you said, it's not going to happen overnight and the kid is most likely going to want reassurance again and again. Really? Do you really mean it? What about now? What about when I eat this entire bag of whatever? And so that's the hard part I think for the parent who's been steeped in diet-culture is trusting, okay, they just ate that it's going to be okay. I'm not going to restrict that again because if I do that, that sets us back up on the exact same path that we were before. I'm going to trust and allow this to happen to work itself out. And it really does over time with enough time and practice and space and support and conversations, and it's all messy and difficult, but I've seen it happen for families that never thought it could. So it is possible,
Virginia Sole-Smith: And I want to be clear that the victory is not that you'll get a kid, and this isn't what you're saying, but I just like to spell it out. The victory is not that you'll get a kid who no longer likes sugar that they'll eventually like, okay, they'll have to eat a lot at first, and then they won't want it anymore. That's not where this is going. You're probably going to have a kid who always likes sugar because we all like sugar, it's normal to like sugar. And who may always want to eat three brownies in one setting when they come out fresh from the oven, and that's completely normal and great, but they won't have a fraught relationship with it. They won't feel shame afterwards. They won't feel anxious that they can't get as much as they want. They won't obsess over it. They'll be able to enjoy the food they enjoy in whatever quantity is enjoyable to them and then move on with their day and their life. And I think that's just a nuance to it that sometimes I worry parents who are like, oh, okay, if we do this, they'll eat less sugar. And I'm like, no, they're probably always going to eat more sugar than you thought was okay. But that's because kids
Christy Harrison: Love sugar and need it, actually need lots of carbs to grow and to function, and it's great.
Virginia Sole-Smith: And because your starting point of what is the right amount of sugar was not a right answer, that was diet culture. It was not a reasonable expectation. So yeah.
Christy Harrison: No, such an important point. And something that I like to articulate too is the goal is never to have this sort of wellness culture relationship with food where it's like, I'm just drawn to whole foods and unprocessed and plant-based and blah, blah, blah, and I never want sugar, which is what I think a lot of people think it's supposed to look like, because again, being conditioned by diet and wellness culture, that's what a healthy eating plan is supposed to look like. And I think these interpretations of Intuitive Eating, like interpretations of the division of responsibility, I see so many diet and wellness culture tinged interpretations of Intuitive Eating that say that essentially, right? That's like you're not going to want those things anymore. Or the interpretations of mindful eating where it's kind of the same thing. There's a book that came out a few years ago by a big mindful eating person that was the joy of eating X food, and it was basically a very restrictive amount of a food that's deemed bad, right?
Virginia Sole-Smith: Ugh. So frustrating.
Christy Harrison: It's so frustrating. So yeah, it's not that that's not what we're going for here, but having a relaxed relationship with food, having the ability to eat as much sugar or whatever other kind of food that you want and in need is the goal. And to not beat yourself up over it, to have a kid who can just move on with their life. Right. Well, thank you so much for being here. This is such a great conversation and I love your book. I feel like it is so needed, and I think it's going to do so much good for people, not just parents. I think it's going to be very helpful for parents, but also just anyone who has been parented. I've found myself resonating with things as a child of parents who've gone through certain things in my life and my relationship with food. I think there's a lot there for everyone really.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Oh, thank you so much.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. So tell us where people can find the book and you and learn more about your work.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Sure. So the book is Fat Talk Parenting in the Age of diet-culture. It is available all of the places that you buy books. There's audiobook and ebook and hard cover, regular paper book. And then you can also subscribe to my newsletter, which is called Burnt Toast. It's at virginiasolesmith.substack.com. And I also host the Burnt Toast podcast, which you can get wherever you are listening to this podcast. And then if you, that's still not enough for you. You can also follow me on social media, Instagram, Twitter, and a little bit of TikTok, and it's @v_SoleSmith for all of that.
Christy Harrison: Amazing. We'll put links to that in the show notes too, so people can find you.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Thank you.
Christy Harrison: Thank you so much for being here. It's a pleasure to talk with you, as always.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Always, always. Thank you so much, Christy.
Christy Harrison: So that's our show. Thanks so much to our guest for being here, and thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd be so grateful if you take a moment to subscribe, rate and review the podcast wherever you're listening to this, and you can get new episodes delivered by email every other week by signing up at rethinkingwellness.subtstack.com, where you can also become a paid subscriber for early access to episodes and to help support the show. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
If you're looking for help healing your own relationship with food and breaking free from diet and wellness culture, I'd love for you to check out my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. You can learn more and sign up at ChristyHarrison.com/course. That's ChristyHarrison.com/course. If you have any questions for me about wellness and diet-culture, you can send them in at ChristyHarrison.com/questions for a chance to have them answered in my newsletter or possibly even on this podcast sometime in the future. Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer, and administrative support is provided by Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team Virtual. Our album Art was created by Tara Jacoby, and theme song was written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Thanks again for listening.
