00:00:00

Intro

00:07:10

A bit about Virginia’s background

00:10:29

What food was like for her growing up

00:15:40

How being in women’s media affected her relationship to food

00:22:10

Her experience with pregnancy

00:25:46

Why her baby daughter suddenly stopped eating

00:31:37

Problems with the behavioural approach to feeding therapy

00:36:00

The child-led model of feeding therapy

00:46:28

The importance of modelling eating for kids

00:55:55

The myth of the sugar high

01:05:55

How to find Virginia + her writing

01:07:08

Chris’s recommendation for this week

00:00:00

Intro

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 216 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/216.

For the last little while, I’ve been starting the show talking about the fact that Seven Health is taking on new clients. At the time of recording this intro, we have just two spots left.

Client work is the thing I enjoy the most, and after working with clients for over a decade, I feel confident in saying I’m very good at what I do. When I reflect on the clients that have sought out Seven Health over the last couple of years, there’s a handful of areas that come up the most.

One of the biggest is helping women get their period back, so recovery from hypothalamic amenorrhea, or HA. I’ve had clients regain their period after being absent for 10 or even 20 years, often after being told it would never happen again, or clients becoming pregnant when they’d given up hope of it happening.

I also work with clients along the disordered eating and eating disorder spectrum. Many clients use the term ‘quasi-recovery’ to describe where they’re at because things are better than they were when things were at their worst, but they’re still far away from the place of freedom that they really crave.

At Seven Health, we believe in full recovery. I’ve had many clients who’ve had multiple stays at inpatient facilities where nothing worked, but through working together, they’ve got to a place of full recovery.

Transitioning out of dieting is another one. Clients have had years or decades of dieting, and they know that it doesn’t work, but they’re really struggling to figure out how to eat and how to live without dieting because often it’s something they’ve been doing all their life, for as long as they remember.

Body shame and hatred and a struggle with body acceptance is the final common area that clients are dealing with. They want to get past this and be able to be present in their life and stop putting things on hold, but are really unsure of how to start.

In all of these scenarios, we use the core components of Seven Health and what it’s about, which is science and compassion. We focus on physiology and psychology, so understanding both how the body works and how best to support it, but also understanding the mental and emotional side and uncovering someone’s identity and values and priorities and the traits and beliefs that are either helping or hindering someone.

It’s these kind of clients that make up the bulk of the practice, and I’m very good at guiding and supporting people through this process.

If any of these scenarios sound like you and you’d like help, then please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help, and you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. This will be the last time I’m starting with clients in 2020, and as I said at the start, there are just two spots left. So if you’re wanting help, then please reach out. The link, again, is seven-health.com/help, and I’ll include that in the show notes.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. Today on the podcast, it’s another guest interview, and my guest today is Virginia Sole-Smith. Virginia is the author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. She writes about food, body image, and feminism. She’s also a frequent contributor to the New York Times Parenting and co-host of Comfort Food Podcast.

I recently read Virginia’s book, The Eating Instinct, and I really liked it. Part of this is obviously the topic and the many things that she covers in the book, but also a big part of it is Virginia’s writing style and how enjoyable it was to read. Reading it, I can tell that she’s a journalist. It’s well-written, it’s well-edited. So rather than just learning new information, I was doing it while also reading good copy that was enjoyable to read. There were many parts of the book that were new information or stuff that I was excited to be reading about, so I wanted to have Virginia on to chat about it.

As part of this episode, we talk about Virginia’s background and her history with food and dieting and how she became a journalist covering the topic of food and nutrition. We then spend a decent chunk of the time talking about Virginia’s daughter, Violet, who really was the reason for her writing the book. Violet had a life-threatening condition that led to surgery when she was about a month old, and this experience led to Violet stopping eating and not wanting to put anything, especially food, near her mouth. They had to go through a couple of years of Violet re-learning how to eat.

We talk about that process, with the different thoughts within the field, with the behaviourist way of thinking versus more of the child-led way of doing things, and also what Virginia learnt about her own eating and her own thoughts around food by going through this process with Violet. We also talk about a piece that Virginia wrote for the New York Times called “Sugar Is Not Your Enemy” and the myth around the idea of a sugar high. We both talk about our own experiences with our own children and how we’ve approached sugar and food in general.

For this episode, a lot of the focus is around feeding children, but the same ideas are applicable for eaters of all ages – especially if you are someone who has a fraught relationship with food.

For this conversation, Virginia could only schedule an hour for a chat, and it was kind of strange going back to having an hour to have a conversation with someone and noticing how quickly that time goes and knowing how much good information there was in the book that I did want to cover. I really loved the time that we had together, but I definitely wish we’d had longer, and possibly in the not-too-distant future I’ll do a second episode with Virginia, as there was lots of the book that I wanted to cover that I haven’t talked about before on the podcast. So let’s see if there can be a round 2 in the not-too-distant future.

I have a recommendation that I want to give after this episode, but for now, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Virginia Sole-Smith.

Hey, Virginia. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for joining me on the show today.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Thank you for having me.

Chris Sandel: A lot of today’s conversation is going to focus around your book, The Eating Instinct, which I really enjoyed. We’re definitely not going to exhaust everything in the book, so for listeners, this isn’t a substitute for reading it. I would recommend people checking it out. You’ve also written for many publications, and you write a really great piece for the New York Times called “Sugar Is Not the Enemy” that I’d also love to cover. That’s a lot of what I’m hoping we’ll go through, and we can go down any rabbit holes or just see where the conversation goes.

00:07:10

A bit about Virginia’s background

But to start off with, do you want to give listeners a brief background on yourself – who you are, what you do, what training you’ve had, that sort of thing?

Virginia Sole-Smith: Sure. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. As Chris said, I’m the author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. Before writing that book, I had spent – oh gosh, about 10-12 years as a journalist. Mostly in the beginning, I was a journalist for a lot of women’s magazines, which means I wrote a lot of stories on how to lose weight. Lot of diets. I was always telling myself, “But this isn’t a diet. It’s a lifestyle plan,” and all the things we’re all familiar with. [laughs]

But I was doing that for years and feeling increasingly at odds with it, dissatisfied, like I was doing some sort of evil things. But I did have this training as a health journalist. I know how to read medical studies. I’ve spent time at health conferences talking to doctors. That’s my background, for sure.

What led to the book was this major left turn in my life when I became a Mom. My daughter Violet, who is now seven, when she was born, she was born with a rare congenital heart condition. When she was just a month old, she went into heart failure, nearly died – they saved her life, obviously, as she’s seven now – but the big side effect of this medical trauma she underwent was that she completely stopped eating.

I think a lot of people go into parenthood with these preconceived notions about how they’re going to do just about everything with parenthood, but especially around how they’re going to feed their children. Coming from this women’s magazine, foodie culture that I had spent more than a decade steeped in, reporting on – again, not just weight loss, but also things like organic food and local food and the whole wellness food culture that had really risen up during my career – I had definitely gone into parenthood thinking “I’m going to breastfeed exclusively. Then I’m going to make my own baby food. There will never be sugar in my house,” all these ideas. [laughs]

Not only was it just the usual wake-up with parenthood, but instead it was like, “Oh, your child can’t eat at all. She’s on a feeding tube. You have to throw out everything you thought you understood about how we learn to eat and how we feed kids and start from scratch.”

Having that personal experience then jumpstarted me to look very critically at everything I had been taught around food because the advice we were getting to help her wasn’t really working, and it made me realise how much the advice we all get on how we learn to eat doesn’t really work. Because it’s all about teaching us how to eat according to these outside plans, these outside rules.

That’s what led me to research the book, and then from doing the book – which came out two years ago – I’ve continued on this path of reporting much more now on the anti-diet movement, body positivity, fat acceptance, all these things. I do a lot of reporting on weight stigma. And then I write this column that you referenced for the New York Times Parenting section that comes out once a month, where I look at different issues around food and body image that parents are navigating for themselves or with their kids.

00:10:29

What food was like for her growing up

Chris Sandel: Nice. There’s a lot there I want to go through in detail, especially in terms of Violet’s story. But going back for you, what was your relationship with food like? What was your childhood like in connection with food?

Virginia Sole-Smith: I’m almost 40, so I’m a kid of the ’80s, and ’80s food culture was very different from what we have today. Lunchables were the cool thing. SnackWell’s, Yoplait yogurt. Processed food didn’t have the stigma that it has now, which was both good and bad, I think. There was definitely diet culture, there was huge fear of fat in food. It was all low fat. But at the same time, there wasn’t this idea that parents had to be packing rainbows of produce in their kids’ lunchboxes. Sending in a bag of chips and some SnackWell cookies was totally fine. So in some ways the standards were lower; in some ways the standards were just different.

For me personally, I was a naturally skinny kid and I was a pretty picky eater. I didn’t ever really worry about weight in that sense until I was in college and my body changed, and I realised, “Oh, this free pass I’ve had my whole life where people look at me and say ‘I wish I could be like you’ isn’t going to be my adult experience.” That was very difficult to come to terms with. But it means that I definitely benefited from thin privilege pretty much through my whole childhood. I didn’t have the early dieting and early angst around body image that a lot of folks struggle with. And of course, I continue to benefit from thin privilege today in many ways.

In some ways felt like diet culture was this thing I was just looking at for a long time, and then slowly I started to see more and more how it intersected with my own life.

Chris Sandel: Were you actually noticing it, though, with others? I don’t know what your parents’ relationship with food was like – were you completely blind to it, and it was only later on that you realised how much a big thing this was in the world? Or you saw it around but somehow you just didn’t have to participate?

Virginia Sole-Smith: I certainly saw other people struggling with it. I had a lot of friends – by the time we were in fourth or fifth grade, I had friends going on diets and talking about wanting to lose weight. But because I was not in a bigger body, I was like the good best friend telling them, “No, you’re beautiful the way you are” and giving lots of terrible advice and not understanding what they were dealing with.

Then in terms of my parents, there was more diet culture talk in my house, but they applied it to themselves much more than they applied it to me, I would say. That shifted somewhat as I got older and when I did gain some weight in college, but for the most part, it was my dad making comments about he can’t eat that, but “You can eat it, Virginia. You’re fine.”

Those sorts of things where as a kid, again, in a smaller body, you’re thinking, “Well, great, I guess that’s your problem.” And then, of course, later on you think, what a weird – that’s not a helpful message. Why are we making these rules over who can and can’t have certain foods and good and bad bodies?

The reality is – and I say this all the time to parents now – the messages you give your kids in smaller bodies matter just as much as the message we give our kids in bigger bodies because there’s no guarantee anyone’s staying the same size. In fact, you can almost guarantee you’re not staying the same size your whole life. If we all stayed our high school size, things would be really wrong. So it’s not helpful to tell people that they’re doing so well when they’re actually not doing anything to change. My thin body as a child was just a product of genetics. It wasn’t some talent I had. Then it was difficult later on to be like, “Oh, that thing felt so important to my identity, but it’s not my identity.”

Chris Sandel: Yeah. Was there something that then happened that meant that you transitioned to being in a larger body? Or just, again, “this is just what happens at that point in my life”?

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah, it was just life. I went to college. A lot of kids, when you go away to college, it’s normal to gain some weight as you’re experimenting with living on your own and feeding yourself and the stress of the first year of college. My friend and I figured out that the dining hall had really good triple decker peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and we ate that for many meals. [laughs] And I still stand by that. They were delicious.

Honestly, if you look at all the women in my family, my British grandmother who I was just telling you about, it’s not a surprise to anyone that my body changed. It’s just the genetic blueprint that I have, and that is what it is. But what often happens with parents when they’re not happy with their own bodies, it’s like a warning to kids of “don’t end up like me.” So then it was difficult to realise “Oh, my normal body is this thing that I have been told not to want for so long.”

00:15:40

How being in women’s media affected her relationship to food

Chris Sandel: When you went off to college, were you starting as a journalist?

Virginia Sole-Smith: I was an English and creative writing major, and I went to New York University in New York City. I did a lot of internships at magazines. This was the late ’90s, early 2000s, so women’s magazines in particular were very glam. Condé Nast was the centre of New York publishing where everyone wanted to work at Glamour and Vogue and places like that.

That was another piece of this because as my body was changing and as I was going from this effortlessly skinny person to someone who was going to be more in a medium size, small fat, whatever you want to call it, shape, I was also starting to work towards a career in this world of women’s media and fashion where the standards are ridiculous and have always been ridiculous, and at that point were particularly ridiculous. So it was even more difficult at that point to reconcile what was happening to me personally with the expectations. Thinness felt very tied to my career goals at that point.

Chris Sandel: Do you think this would’ve been an area of interest if your body hadn’t started to change? Was this an area that you were excited about when you were 17 or 18 in terms of reading about that?

Virginia Sole-Smith: That’s an interesting question. Because I had these friends in childhood who were dieting pretty intensively, and I worried about them, and I certainly identified as a feminist – my mom is a really strong feminist, and so is my stepmom, so I was definitely raised with a lot of feminist values.

I was very conscious of going into women’s media thinking, “Maybe we can make it better. Maybe we can change the system from the inside.” I remember saying that to my first boss and her laughing at my naïveté. [laughs] I’m really surprised I got that job because that’s a bold thing to say to someone on a job interview.

But yeah, I didn’t agree with the standards at all. I felt very uncomfortable with that. But I don’t know, if I didn’t have such a personal experience around it, if I would’ve focused on the weight piece as much or if I would’ve focused on other aspects of it. Because we could talk all day about the ways that women’s media have been harmful to women, and it’s not just body image, although that’s a big one.

Chris Sandel: I get a sense that the media, or at least the way we talked about food and health and all of that, then shifted so it wasn’t about weight loss per se, or that was the added benefit you get from eating organic or local. The whole Michael Pollan revolution type thing was going on when you were writing, I’m assuming.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes, absolutely. My first magazine job was in 2003, right when the whole alternative food movement was really reaching a peak. Supersize Me came out a few years later. Michael Pollan published Omnivore’s Dilemma. I think what’s so interesting about that shift was that it felt like a rejection of diet culture at first. It felt like “You don’t have to be counting calories. You don’t have to be eating light or low fat things. All of that is so dated and old, and oh my gosh, we’re not doing that anymore. We are eating clean. We are eating whole foods. We are eating whole grains and kale and everything.”

Somehow it felt liberating even though it was just a new set of very stringent standards. And it did put weight as more of a footnote, except that it was still really all about weight when you drilled down into what those food messages were about. The number one thing they were always fighting was the idea of gaining weight and being in a bigger body.

I think I was definitely bought in by a lot of that. My first job was at Seventeen Magazine, where it was very diet-y, and then I went to a magazine called Organic Style, which was super food movement, Michael Pollan, all of that. I think that felt super like “Ooh, we’re doing something totally different and I don’t have to worry about it, but somehow it will make me effortlessly thin.” Always that underpinning of it.

Again, it wasn’t until a couple years into it that I started realising, actually, growing all your own food is a lot of work and not super realistic for most of us. And feeling bad because you ate something that travelled more miles than it should’ve – it’s not to discount the environmental points that that community is making, which are important, but it very quickly turns into something else.

Chris Sandel: I’ve got a weird relationship with Michael Pollan. I was very much into him early on, and I loved The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Eater’s Manifesto or whatever. It’s only in more recent years that I’ve realised how much of an issue it really is. Ad then he’s spring-boarding into talking about psychedelics, and that’s been really interesting. I’m like, okay, he’s starting to redeem himself. So yeah, I have what I call a complicated relationship with Michael Pollan.

Virginia Sole-Smith: I think many of us do. I think he really changed food culture in – he’s had a tremendous impact, for better or for worse. He may feel that it’s an unfair criticism to draw a line from him to things like juicing and kale smoothies and all of that, but having worked in women’s media as he was coming up, I know very concretely how his message was getting distilled in those communities – in the influencer community, in the celebrity community.

There’s also something very inherently sexist in the way he talks about how it all fell apart once – I mean, he doesn’t say “women went to work and then it all fell apart,” but it is this reverence for the idea of your grandmother at home making all the food from scratch. It’s like, okay, but who’s going to do that now? Because I want to have a career, and I need to not feel bad about sending my kid to school with applesauce pouches because I’m not going to make my own applesauce. It’s just never going to happen.

00:22:10

Her experience with pregnancy

Chris Sandel: Yeah. Where were you in terms of your relationship with food at the point where you got pregnant?

Virginia Sole-Smith: In a murky place. [laughs] It’s funny; I think I had really decided officially on paper that I wasn’t dieting anymore, and I was done with that, but we had a vegetable garden I was spending a lot of time on. I was definitely still very invested in the Michael Pollan version of things. I was trying to break up with the weight loss message but keep all the rest, and in some ways that doesn’t work because you always keep coming back to a weight loss message when you follow those rules.

And then when you added the layer of pregnancy – the way we talk to women about pregnancy in this culture, its’ like we put all of this responsibility on the mother. We talk about “You’re building a healthy baby. You have to eat X, Y, and Z. Don’t eat these things. Do eat these things.” You really feel the burden of every cell dividing with every bite of food you take in pregnancy, especially in your first pregnancy.

It was tremendously stressful. I was counting calcium grams when I was pregnant with Violet, really worrying so much about all these things, doing all this prenatal yoga. So then to have a child born with a life-threatening condition – I spent a good two years looking back saying, “What did I do wrong? What did I eat wrong? My body failed her. I did this, I did this, I did this.” It took therapy and a lot of work to understand, no, genetic mutations just happen. They are not my fault. They’re not the fault of anyone. It’s not because I stood too close to someone pumping gasoline or whatever the crazy things I came up with.

Chris Sandel: Shouldn’t have had so much tinned tuna or whatever it is.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes, totally, or because I had some kind of cheese one time. That definitely set me up for going into motherhood thinking I had to do everything perfectly, and then when everything changed, it was very difficult to put all those pieces back together.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. What about in terms of your partner and his eating? Was there any part of dieting that you guys were doing together? Or that’s just not part of –

Virginia Sole-Smith: That’s a good question. My husband Dan has a permanent thin privilege pass. He is a skinny white man. [laughs] He does not think very hard about what he eats other than if he’s hungry, he will eat whatever food is around. In some ways it’s very refreshing because he doesn’t shame food. He has no good good/bad food stuff.

On the other hand, he’s never experienced being in a more marginalised body, so there are times when he just can’t understand other people’s struggles on it. He’s a very active guy, does a lot of mountain climbing and running, and I think he did live with this mind-set of “I’ll just go out and run 10 miles and it’ll all be fine.” He had that very simple “I can eat whatever I want because I work out a ton” attitude, which is very common, I think, in men in general and in diet culture.

So there were some diet culture messages, but I wouldn’t say he was someone who body-shamed or food-shamed or anything like that. And certainly when it came to the pregnancy, he wasn’t putting any pressure on me. That was all me and the larger culture creating those sets of expectations.

00:25:46

Why her baby daughter suddenly stopped eating

Chris Sandel: Talk then more about Violet and what happened after that day on the 17^th of September, 2013, and how that affected her eating and what that looked like.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah, September 17^th, 2013 was the day before her one-month birthday. We are still in the trenches of new parenthood, not sleeping well. I’m breastfeeding. It’s sort of working, sort of not working. I can’t really tell still. But she had left the hospital. Everyone thought she was healthy. We’d had her two-week check-up. She had regained her birth weight. So we thought everything was fine.

But that night she slept I want to say like 6 hours, which is very long for a new-born. And there’d been another night where she’d slept 9 hours, so she was sleeping a lot more suddenly. We thought, “Oh thank God, because we’re exhausted.” [laughs]

Chris Sandel: You’d hit the gold mine, just perfect.

Virginia Sole-Smith: “We have a good baby.” So we didn’t question it. But then that morning, even though she had slept so long – and I’d gone in once in the middle of the night; she’d let out one cry, and I’d gone in and tried to nurse her. She’d fallen right back asleep. I’m so exhausted, I go back to sleep. Then that morning I’m trying to nurse her again and she’s just falling back asleep again. I did say to Dan, “This doesn’t seem right.”

Fortunately we were on our way to the paediatrician because we had her one-month well visit. We got to the doctor’s office. They weighed her; she weighed less than she had when she was born, and she was 7 pounds, 9 ounces when she was born. Now she was I think 7 pounds, 1 ounce or something. It was a big loss for such a small baby, but we couldn’t really see it ourselves.

Then the doctor came in and she said, “Her lips are blue and her fingertips are blue, and that means there’s something wrong with her heart.” At that point, the day is a blur still, but we were quickly in with the cardiologist. We were quickly in one ambulance, went to one hospital, we were in another ambulance to another hospital. Basically what was happening was all the defects her heart was born with were manifesting. It’s complicated science we don’t need to get into, but babies’ hearts, when they’re born with these conditions, they have a few weeks where they operate and then they start to shut down.

Her heart was shutting down. Her blood oxygen was plummeting. Your oxygen level is supposed to be 100% or high 90s. She was down at like 70% in that doctor’s office. By the end of the day, she’s gotten down to 18%, and they had to put her on an emergency ventilator, ramming a breathing tube down her throat. She wasn’t fully sedated.

They rushed her off into surgery. Saved her life, but all of that trauma, both with the shutting down, struggling to breastfeed but too weak to do it, the breathing tube coming in, and then over the next several days – she had an open heart surgery the following week – it was just trauma after trauma. Again, all necessary, what we had to do save her life. But tons of tubes and suctions in her mouth.

So she just shut down with anything coming near her mouth. She could not latch to breastfeed. She would not accept a bottle. She screamed and turned her head away whenever you tried to feed her. So they had to put her on a feeding tube, at first just to try to recoup some of that weight loss before her open heart surgery. Then after the surgery they thought she’d be off the feeding tube in a couple of days. Then a couple of days became a week and then it became two weeks and then it was a month we’d been in the hospital, and they said, “She’s otherwise stable. You can take her home, but you have to take the feeding tube with you.”

So that’s what we did.

Chris Sandel: Wow. I’m imagining frantically googling everything, especially when the feeding tube bit went on longer. Were you starting to google “What does this mean?” Especially if you were still in the “I’ve got to do everything perfectly for her,” it’s like, “What is the best way to get nutrition with a feeding tube?” or something along those lines?

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes. There were so many pieces of this puzzle we were trying to understand. The feeding piece felt like the part I should be in charge of. The doctors are going to figure out her heart stuff. I mean, I did spend a lot of time – I could tell you a lot about infant cardiology. But that I could trust the heart surgeon to know what he was doing. He’s this brilliant person who’s done these surgeries before.

But the feeding, it was like “That’s the mom’s job. That’s what I’m supposed to be able to do right now and I can’t do it.” This is the double-edged sword of having the health journalism training. [laughs] It’s a good and a bad thing, I think, that I can google and also really deeply google and do the research. And I was still pumping, trying to produce breastmilk for her feeding tube. That was failing fast, but I was trying. We were trying to feed every 3 hours all night long, so I was up all night on the breast pump or trying to feed her.

It was like 3:00 in the morning, just sitting on the breast pump, sitting on my computer, researching all of this. I was terrified I was a huge failure, again, that somehow this was my fault, I had done this. I didn’t understand at that point that it was the medical trauma and being sick that had made her stop eating. I thought I had screwed it up. So I was trying to solve that mystery.

Then it turns out – especially 7 years ago – it has improved, but 7 years ago when we were dealing with this, there’s not a lot of good help out there for babies who stop eating. They put them on feeding tubes and then they just assume they’ll work it out at some point. Some kids do that; some kids with Violet’s same condition go on the feeding tube to regain the weight before the surgery or whatever and then they’re off it again two weeks later. But for the ones who don’t, there’s this like “What do we do?”

00:31:37

Problems with the behavioural approach to feeding therapy

There are feeding therapists that work on these issues, but there’s a really big divide in terms of how you approach helping a baby do this. There’s one school of thought that teaches it from a behavioural therapy perspective, where it’s almost like training a puppy. You figure out a reward that will incentivise them to do it and you offer a reward every time they drink so much of the bottle or have a bite of solid food, if you’re dealing with an older child. It’s this eat, reward, eat, reward thing.

But that doesn’t deal with any of the underlying trauma. It doesn’t deal with the fact that this was a baby who wasn’t putting toys in her mouth. If you watch healthy infants, they put everything in their mouths as soon as they’re able. And I didn’t even understand why people worried about choking hazards with Violet because it never happened. She never put toys in her mouth or reached for buttons or anything like that because the aversion was so intense.

The behavioural model unsettled me for many reasons, not the least of which was it was training her to eat for external reasons. And I had just spent a whole decade really deeply stepped in diet culture, which was trying to do the same thing.

It did not sit right that I would take this baby, who I knew when she was born knew how to eat, and instead of saying, “How do I reconnect you to sensing your own hunger and fullness? How do I reconnect you with your body?”, I’d say “Let’s train you to eat according to this set of rules, according to our expectations, let’s set goals, let’s work towards this progress” – it felt like a reverse way of putting my child on a diet, basically, except with a goal of having her eat versus having her eat less.

Chris Sandel: It was interesting when I was reading through that. I was wondering, have you come across the work of Alfie Kohn?

Virginia Sole-Smith: No, I don’t think I know Alfie Kohn.

Chris Sandel: He’s written a number of books. He was an educator and then has gone into writing a lot and then goes into schools and parents and everything. He’s got a really big thing against behaviouralists. Every one of his books – like Unconditional Parenting, another one’s about the problem with gold stars. Really looking at the real issues with trying to control kids, and even when you’re trying to do it in a helpful way – so “I’m not spanking my child, I’m giving them a gold star or we’re putting up this chart that shows they’ve gone to the toilet and they get to tick something off every time.”

He’s just like, all of these methods are a problem, and then tries to look at what is the thing that is going to most be beneficial for the child in terms of their long-term outcomes? This is where he then takes more of the child-led approach, which you then moved on to as part of this.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah. If you think about it, yes, you’re not pushing the child – although I’ve seen some behavioural feeding therapy programs that do even get slightly punitive. But you’re praising them. You’re saying, “Good job, you took your bite.”

But if you’re doing that when the child is inside experiencing intense fear or intense pain around the idea of eating, you’re training them to ignore all of these signals in their body that we want our kids – I don’t want my daughter to grow up and think she should ignore any sense of fear or discomfort in her body when someone’s telling her to do something that she doesn’t want to do. That’s a terrifying slope to be down. Especially when she was so, so, so little, this really would be almost all she knew. Our early feeding experiences were a matter of days.

So the idea that we would train her to disconnect from her body so intensely terrified me. I have a really deep concern with that. And even when you’re not asking a kid to push through some really big, scary feeling, praise is pressure. Of course they want to please us, and of course they’re looking for that. And then if they can’t deliver every time, you don’t want to ever make your child feel like your love or your respect is contingent on them pleasing you. That’s just really messed up. So yeah, that way was not going to work.

Chris Sandel: It doesn’t matter if there’s compliance. Compliance on its own is not a good end goal.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah. That just means that you’ve won, but it’s not the goal.

00:36:00

The child-led model of feeding therapy

Chris Sandel: The opposite of that – what did that look like?

Virginia Sole-Smith: In the book I call it the child-led model. The term that’s being used these days is responsive feeding. It’s really the opposite in a lot of ways. You start by trying to understand the child and understand where they’re coming from. These were therapists that said to me things like, “Violet deciding not to eat was actually a really good choice.” That rocked my world. Like, “What do you mean? A child not eating is never a good choice.”

But what they meant was she stopped eating when she was in danger of not breathing, and breathing is her more primal need. So she was protecting herself. As an infant, without language, without any other skills or tools to use, when she was stopping things going into her mouth, it was an act of self-preservation. Of course, as a coping skill it has serious downsides, but in those early days it was a good choice.

Suddenly I could – this sounds weird to say I could respect my baby, but I could honour how important that was for her to do at that time, and then I could honour that we have to help her feel safe. We have to help her realise that she doesn’t need to do that anymore, and that food is not going to hurt her, that putting things near her mouth is not going to hurt her. How do we heal this trauma? How do we take time to really build positive associations with food and with touch as well, all these things?

It looks really different. For a long time it looks like it’s not working at all because you have to work on the kid’s timeline. In retrospect, with Violet it took a little over two years – two and a half years, let’s call it, which at the time felt endless, but I now know from having done much more reporting in this field is actually pretty damn quick for a lot of kids, depending what level of trauma you’re dealing with and all the other circumstances – what the family table is like, where the child is developmentally, all these different things. It can take a really long time.

But the result is a child who trusts their body. A child who knows that their hunger matters, that their fullness matters, but also that their sense of security and comfort matters, and that they should first and foremost feel comfortable and confident in their body before they have to do any of the things that the rest of the world is expecting of them.

If you think about the types of struggles that so many people have around food, you think if we could start from there, how much better could this be?

Chris Sandel: Definitely. It’s interesting. I’ve got a three-year-old son, just turned three, and from the outset when he was born, the goal was “How can he be a competent eater and really just listen to his own body?”, and really getting away from anything connected to health. We don’t make any comments about “this is healthy food” or any of that in the household. We got into Ellyn Satter’s division of responsibility and we were able to do that.

What’s been really interesting was that we did baby-led weaning, so when he first started eating solids, he would be the one picking what he was going to eat. We’d put a buffet style thing in front of him and he’d chew on things and slightly learn what he was eating. He had this real huge amount of variety that he would eat.

Then he went through a phase that he’s just starting to come out of, but for probably the last 6 months, he’s barely eaten a vegetable. Yeah, there’ll be some potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maybe some other bits and pieces, but every other bit of vegetable that is on his plate, I put it down and either he’s like, “Dad, I don’t want this, I don’t want this, I don’t want this” and just puts it on my plate, or it just gets left there.

(A) There was no part of me labelling him a picky eater, and (B) there was no part of me that was like “Hey, you have to eat this,” or “If you eat this, then we’ll be able to do this other thing.” So it was interesting when you were talking about getting her to listen to her own body and trust her own body. It also sounds like there was a big part of her being able to trust you and the environments that you were going to put her in.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes, absolutely. That’s a huge piece of it. What you were talking about with your son, my younger daughter, who’s typically developing, we’ve had the same sort of experience with.

It’s amazing to watch a typical eater develop in that way. They are effortless at understanding what they want and what they don’t want and what they need and advocating for that. All of that was what we had to get Violet back to. I wanted to get her back to being a normal toddler who’s saying, “No, I don’t eat green vegetables right now, but I love cheese and I love sweet potatoes.”

Yes, a lot of that was about her learning that we were not going to push it on her and we were not going to push the spoon in her face repeatedly, that we were not going to sit there and count bites, all these ways.

Also, there’s times where she would take a bite of something and Dan and I would stare at each other, but not say anything and just keep going, act normal, because that was also going to be pressure if she knew that she ate and she got this big reaction from Mom and Dad. That wouldn’t help. So there was that piece of it too. We just had to keep working on, how do we make family meals as low stress as possible?

One thing that was good for us was pre-kids, Dan in particular was not on a very clear – he often skipped breakfast and was all over the place with his meal times. I’ve always been someone who wakes up and wants breakfast, but he’s a little more loosey-goosey about it. But I was like, “No, we’re got to start eating on more of a schedule for us so she can see it and we can model food and model eating with her.” That was really good for us, to help us get more in tune with stuff.

But I think she just needed tons and tons and tons of positive, but low pressure exposures to food. She never got there with the bottle or drinking formula or breastmilk or any of that. That was done. But solid food was more interesting. We also did a version of baby-led weaning where we could let her poke around at stuff on her tray and then decide if she wanted to put something in her mouth, which was very different from like “Here’s a bottle I’m trying to put in your mouth.” That gave her a lot more freedom to explore and come at it from a different place, so that was really interesting.

Chris Sandel: Nice. I know she had another surgery that then stopped her eating again, so how was that when it happened a second time?

Virginia Sole-Smith: That was a coda on the whole story. When she was about two and a half, she had her third open heart surgery. At that point we had actually graduated to having her G-tube, the permanent feeding tube in her stomach, removed because she was such a successful oral eater. She had been discharged from feeding therapy. We thought it was all behind us.

But after her third open heart surgery, she went into multiple major organ failure. There were a lot of complications, and she totally stopped eating again. Even once we were through the woods on the various complications, she still wasn’t eating.

It was a horrible experience because this was literally my worst nightmare that we would be back here. I couldn’t bear the thought of having to drop another feeding tube. The feeding tubes they drop in those sorts of situations are called NG tubes. They go through the nose and down the back of the throat to the stomach. Just placing the tube is an incredibly invasive and uncomfortable experience, to say the least. They did end up having to do that to her again, which was horrifying.

Again, there was this moment – I talk about this in the book – where I remember sitting across the table from a dietitian at the hospital who was looking at me with just daggers in her eyes and saying, “If it was my child, I would’ve placed the tube already.” Again, it was like, “Oh God, I’ve failed. They think I’m starving my child. They think I can’t do this, I can’t be trusted around her and food in some way.”

Honestly, when I think back, the layers of privilege actually protecting me in that situation – because if I’d been a mother of colour or someone who didn’t speak the language, they wouldn’t have even given me all those choices. But because of who I am and the privileges I have, they were involving me in that conversation and letting me advocate.

Anyway, we did end up deciding to place the tube, and it was very painful emotionally, and I’m sure for Violet physically not comfortable. She ended up throwing it up and then pulling it out several times because at this point we had a two-and-a-half year-old who really knew her own mind and was not really having it.

But then the next day, we were in the hospital, they brought in the tray with her lunch on it, and she ate a couple bites. We’ll never know; maybe she did just need to get some calories from the feeding tube to give her a little bit of strength and feel more like she could eat, or if we’d waited one more day she would’ve done it anyway. You can’t say. There’s no point in rehashing that.

But it showed me over and over again in that whole experience that when she feels safe and comfortable, she will eat. She is not not eating because she’s trying to displease us in some way. She’s not not eating because she’s broken and she doesn’t know how. She’s not eating because she’s sick and she doesn’t feel safe, and she’s not going to eat when she doesn’t feel safe. That’s fundamental to humans.

So it really taught me, when we think about how we’re feeding kids – and when we think about how we’re feeding ourselves – we have to prioritise safety and comfort from food much, much, much more than our culture lets us. Our culture basically teaches us to feel guilty any time we seek comfort in food or seek pleasure in food. In fact, eating wouldn’t happen, we wouldn’t do it, if we didn’t have those things.

00:46:28

The importance of modelling eating for kids

Chris Sandel: Definitely. That seems like a really big takeaway for you, but are there other things you learned about your own eating or your own eating cues or food experiences by watching Violet learn to eat and get over her aversions?

Virginia Sole-Smith: I think a big one for me was changing how I talk about food. Prior to having Violet, I would engage in some of that “Oh, I’m so bad, I ate blah, blah, blah.” I can’t even quite think of the negative things I used to say, but all the negative ways people talk endlessly about food and being so bad for taking a third brownie. And then I would fixate because I would want the third brownie. I would sit there and be like, “Why is no one else taking another brownie? Can I have one? I don’t know.” That whole craziness we put ourselves through.

Once we went through this with her and I saw that from me, she needs to only understand food as a positive, joyful experience, that means I can’t talk negatively about my own relationship with food. I can’t talk negatively about my body around her. And this is for my younger daughter, too. They only need to know that Mommy loves food, makes good food. They need to think my pasta sauce is the best in the world, that they are allowed to have their own opinions about food and that we all are.

I think in modelling that for her, I was definitely faking it for a little while, but I really did internalise it. I don’t feel shame around food anymore. I can’t remember the last time I ate something and thought, “Ooh, I shouldn’t have eaten that,” and some kind of shame spiral afterwards. It’s just not how I interact with food at all anymore, and that’s hugely liberating. Just weight off my shoulders that I didn’t realise I was carrying, to be honest.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. You said it there in terms of the modelling piece, because I think that is so important. It’s not what you say; it’s what they are able to see, and they see how you’re eating. Kids are so perceptive. And I understand lots of people have struggles with their own relationship with food, and I totally get that, and people have work to do and all of that, so that’s not to shame anyone who’s in that place. But the words just aren’t enough.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah. It’s really hard. I actually did a column recently on this, talking to moms who are struggling with their eating right now and being really aware of how kids pick up on what we say and what we do. They will notice, even if you’re not verbally demonizing food, if you’re not eating gluten, they’re going to be aware of that. They’re going to know that you’re making separate things for yourself.

Definitely, to whatever extent you can, not doing that is really helpful. Or if you’re someone who’s in a place where you’re really deeply struggling, having someone else in your household if that’s possible being the one who makes the meals so that they’re still having someone else feed them in a non-fraught way can be really helpful. It’s a really tricky thing.

I think it’s okay to say to our kids we struggle. If anyone listening to this is thinking “Oh my God, I’m a monster because I called myself fat in front of my kids” or something, I have huge empathy and I don’t want you to feel bad about that. It’s okay to say to kids, “I know I’ve said some negative things about my body before. I really don’t want to do that. I think our bodies are great. I don’t want to do that.” You can evolve for your children, and they can be part of that with you. I think that’s important to focus on.

Chris Sandel: Totally. I’m able to give this advice on food and talk about this with some level of expertise, but I have probably huge blind spots in many other areas of life and many other areas where I’m parenting. Someone who is a child psychologist would look in here and be like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re doing that thing.” So yeah, I’m always very open to that. I am definitely not the perfect person who is doing everything perfectly.

Virginia Sole-Smith: You will never get me giving a podcast or a column on potty training because I’m a mess at it. [laughs] I’ve done it wrong every time. So yes, absolutely.

Chris Sandel: That one seemed to work fine for us, but there’ll be other things that we mess up.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Oh man, yeah. I think it’s important to give ourselves grace. We can struggle.

But there was a nice piece of research, actually, that found that the most damaging thing, of course, was parents talking negatively about their own bodies or talking negatively about their children’s bodies. This was a study on parents with eating disorders. But even parents with eating disorders, if they were able to talk positively about their children’s bodies and positively about food and bodies in general, at least avoid engaging in the negativity, it did offer productive benefits to the kids. The kids seemed to come away more insulated. So it was nice to see that research and be reassured that even if you are struggling and they see the struggle, what you say can really have an impact as well.

Chris Sandel: Nice. Have there been any changes because of lockdown and feeding the kids?

Virginia Sole-Smith: [laughs] I just wrote a column called “Snack Monsters.” What we’re experiencing in my house, which I think everybody is, is once you lose your school schedule and your daily routine becomes a lot blurrier, the meal schedule goes out the window fast too. Disciples of Ellyn Satter’s division of responsibility will tell you that the schedule is crucial. Parents are in charge of when food is offered, and that gives kids time to get hungry between meals and snacks, and then they come to the table hungry and you can trust them to regulate their intake.

It was interesting because especially with my younger daughter, we really lost the plot on this. She was two, she was challenging – as you know – in many ways, and when I was trying to work and parent, it was like, “Okay, she’ll have snacks and that’ll make her be quiet.” It was definitely something I did, just giving her another snack, giving her another snack. What I saw over the summer was, yeah, Ellyn Satter is right. If you do that, if you throw snacks at them every half-hour all morning, they are not going to eat lunch because they’re not hungry anymore. So it was like my own little experiment to prove there’s some wisdom there.

But the other thing I came away with from that was there are going to be seasons in life where you don’t get it right. We can’t treat a model like division of responsibility like another diet, and we can’t feel guilty if we don’t follow the rules exactly. There are going to be seasons in life – and nobody has come up with an eating plan for a pandemic before. [laughs] So we’re in a new season, all of us, especially working parents, where we’re not going to get it perfectly. And kids are so resilient.

We were actually able to draw on that earlier trauma and often say to ourselves many days, “We got through a child in the intensive care unit. We got through the feeding tube. Whatever we’re doing to them now with too much screen time and too much snacks, that is nothing. It’s going to be fine. They can bounce back from this,” and that’s absolutely seeming to be the case.

The issues around snacks – and I know you wanted to talk about sugar, too – the issues around sugar, it’s not the food itself. It’s not that she’s eating Cheez-Its and M&Ms for a snack that’s bad. It’s if I shame that she’s eating Cheez-Its and M&Ms for a snack. That’s what’s going to do the damage to her, if she thinks that the fact that she wants more Cheez-Its is a bad thing and there’s something wrong with her for wanting those foods.

So the more we can take a laidback attitude like, “Yeah, we had a lot of snacks this week. We’re going to go back to our normal schedule. This is snack time, and you can eat as much as you want now and then we’ll have more at lunch” – without bringing in the guilt and the sense of failure and “I’m not doing it perfectly,” that keeps them insulated.

Chris Sandel: Even when you said “maybe we’re not doing it as well or the right way,” I’m like, maybe that is the right way.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Exactly.

Chris Sandel: If you keep the context of all of the things going on, doing that means you could get some work done, which meant you were less stressed, which meant you were a better human being to be with around your daughters. When you factor all of that in, it’s like, actually this was the better option in a long line of shitty options. [laughs]

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes. That is so well put. I think about that all the time. I think so often, particularly with kids’ health but also with our own health, we have this idea that if we’re failing to get an A+ on nutrition, we are failing. There are so many scenarios and so many days where nutrition is not going to be your top priority or even a priority, and it’s fine. It’s the right call. It’s absolutely the right call. You would make your life worse and you would make your child’s life worse if you were trying to reprioritise something that doesn’t need to be a priority on most days.

00:55:55

The myth of the sugar high

Chris Sandel: Definitely. Let’s segue into the article that you wrote, “Sugar Is Not the Enemy.” Two things: how did it come about for you to write about this, but I also want you to describe the article, especially in terms of the whole idea about the ‘sugar high’ and that myth we’ve all been sold.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Pretty much as soon as Violet became a ‘typical’ eater and we were out on the toddler birthday party circuit and sending snacks to school and that kind of thing, I realised, oh wow, parents are terrified of sugar. Sugar is like heroin to parents of pre-schoolers. They are terrified of it in so many ways.

Coming from where I come from, where it is a victory that my child – I couldn’t have fed baby Violet a cupcake. She wouldn’t have touched it. She would’ve been terrified of it. She would’ve screamed her head off if I tried to feed her that. So it is a victory to me that my child loves donuts and loves chocolate and loves ice cream. This is something hard won and hard fought for.

There was an element for a long time, just on a personal note, where I was frustrated about the level of privilege involved in being able to hate sugar. Not just the privilege of you have a healthy kid who eats ‘normally’ and so you can be picky about this, but the privilege that you can obviously afford to eat a certain way, that you are shaming people who aren’t making things from scratch. There’s just a lot of social privilege bound up in being able to hate sugar. That has bothered me personally and professionally any time I’ve seen sugar covered, and particularly sugar and parenting covered.

And then of course, this whole thing about the sugar high comes up, where parents say, “I don’t want to demonise food, but if she does eat sugar, she becomes a monster. What can I do? I have to take away sugar.” I just thought, that can’t be quite right. So I drilled into the research on it, and it’s not. There’s been several studies that have shown that sugar highs don’t happen in the way that parents think they happen.

There’s a couple of studies done on rats where they do document sugar being an addictive substance for rats. Number one, human brains are not rat brains, so we don’t get addicted to all the same things rats do. Number two, that only happened when they deprive the rats of sugar for a long time and restrict their eating and then they give them bunches of sugar, and then of course they binge on it.

In children, when they’ve studied this phenomenon, they find no biochemical activity that would suggest that children are becoming in any way addicted to sugar or high off the sugar. What we think is really happening is parental anxiety is creating the sugar high. If you say to your three-year-old, “You’re going to Timmy’s birthday party on Saturday” – well, it’s a pandemic, so you’re not doing that now, but whatever. “You’re going to wherever you’re going and there’s going to be this delicious treat. Don’t get too crazy. I hope we don’t eat too much sugar.” And then every time they eat some, you say, “Oh boy, you’re going really crazy.”

And let’s say it is a birthday. My toddler is turning three next week. Even without a birthday party, she is going to be high as a kite all day because she’s been anticipating her birthday for weeks. Is she going to have a tantrum on her birthday? Absolutely, because that’s what kids do on birthdays because it’s a stimulating, overwhelming experience to have that much attention and excitement and anticipation. Is it going to be because of her chocolate birthday cake? Definitely not.

So we need to separate out these things that we attribute to the sugar. I think we attribute it to the sugar because we just want a quick fix. We want to be able to say, “Oh, if we just don’t give them sugar, it’ll be fine.” It’s harder to say, “How do I approach a birthday for a three-year-old and deal with all the emotions and expectations and parent her through this in a way that doesn’t result in meltdowns?” Or just to say, “Yeah, she’s going to have meltdowns because it’s a birthday. It tends to happen.”

We jump on the sugar, but when you do that, you only make the sugar thing worse because now you’re giving them all this anxiety around it. Now they know when they’re eating it, they’re having this thing that you don’t feel comfortable with, and that’s a whole lot of layers for them to navigate emotionally.

Chris Sandel: It’s always the one where kids are at a birthday party and they’re running around screaming, and people are like, “Oh, the sugar high.” Like, no, they’re in a confined environment with lots of music and balloons and 10 or 12 or 15 of their friends. They’re going to be squealing and running around even if they’d eaten celery for lunch. It’s less the sugar and more the environment that they’re in.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Absolutely.

Chris Sandel: We just had Ramsay’s third birthday, and we went out for breakfast and he had pancakes for breakfast and a chocolate brownie with ice cream and a candle on top.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Delicious.

Chris Sandel: It was like, “What do you want for breakfast?” and that was what he ordered. Apart from singing happy birthday and there being a candle, we made no bigger deal about it apart from that of like “Are you enjoying it? Does it taste nice? Can I have a bite?” – the same way as we would with any other meal where we’re out or a meal at home. We made no difference about that meal. And his behaviour was no different to when he has his regular breakfast. He hadn’t been primed.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes, and he wasn’t worrying about “I’m wanting this thing that I can’t have” or “Maybe I won’t get as much of it as I want.” That’s another thing that happens around sugar and treats. Parents are much quicker to police portions with kids and sugar and treats.

If you do that, you’re going to see your kids fixate. You’re going to see them worry about if they’re going to get as much as they want. Who’s really to say if one brownie or three brownies is the right amount of brownies for your child? It’s arbitrary, at the end of the day. This is not going to be the thing that makes any difference in their long-term health and any of your bigger concerns for your child. You don’t need to die on Three Brownie Mountain, but we do. [laughs] Parents do it over and over, and that’s what sets up these things.

But it’s hard because once you’re in that pattern – and again, so much empathy to parents who have found themselves in this pattern – you can’t necessarily reset it with one pan of brownies. It’s going to take a while of them learning to trust that you mean it when you say they can decide how much they can have.

But there will come a point where you will see your child – the story I think I put in the article is we were having ice cream a lot over the summer, and my girls were starting to get really excited about ice cream. Violet would wake up in the morning and say, “When are we having ice cream? When are we having ice cream?” I was like, oh, we’re getting really fixated on the ice cream – probably because we had it once and then not for a few days and then had it once and then not for a week.

So I said, “You know what? Every afternoon is ice cream time. It’s a pandemic. We have no fun summer plans. We’re not even leaving the house. What we can all look forward to is 4:00, we will sit on the front porch and eat ice cream and have this nice time together.” They were super, super excited about it. My husband had gone out of town, so we were calling it Ice Cream Week while he was away. We even made ice cream one day because I had hours to fill, so we needed a project. Then we quickly went back to store-bought because that was a lot of work. [laughs] But we had ice cream.

I would say the whole first week, they were like, “When’s ice cream time? Is it ice cream time?” They were into it. Week 2, still kind of into it. By the end of Week 2, puddles of melted ice cream on my front porch. Did not care. Over it. It was like, “Oh yeah, ice cream. Eh, sure, okay.” It didn’t have the power over them anymore.

The victory there is not that they didn’t eat the ice cream or that I somehow broke them of an ice cream habit. The victory is that they knew they had full permission to have as much ice cream as they wanted and have it when they wanted it, so they didn’t have to feel anxious about it anymore.

Chris Sandel: I was going to say the same. Ramsay ate like half of the food that was in front of him on his birthday, and that’s not the good thing. It’s not like “Yes, he did better because he didn’t finish it.” It’s more just that on that occasion, he knew that was enough, and there’ll be another time we’ll have a meal like that and he’ll eat all of it. And that’s also fine.

Recently he’d been asking for hot cross buns. Every time I go to the store, I’m like, “They don’t have hot cross buns. It’s not Easter time. I can’t find them anywhere.” Then we went to a new supermarket and they had hot cross buns, and he was so happy. So we got them, and then the next time we went, we got hot cross buns again. But again, you could see that the second time, the novelty had worn off because they just became a regular thing again that we were able to get when we went shopping.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yeah. My biggest tip to parents on this is whatever the food is they seem manic about, lean right into it. Make it very available and let its novelty die down so that then they can get to a place where – it’s funny, actually; Violet just said to me last night, “We lost track of having our ice cream every day.” [laughs] I was like, “Well, you stopped eating it. I wasn’t just going to melt $8 in ice cream every day on the front porch.” She was like, “We need to bring that back.” I said, “Okay, fine, let’s have ice cream this weekend. Totally. That’ll be great.”

But it was great to see – of course she still enjoys ice cream, but it was this very natural like “that was great for a while, then it got boring, now it sounds interesting again.” That’s natural interacting with food. Like “This sounds really good. I haven’t had it in a while. Mm, that’ll be so delicious. Okay, I’ve had it. Now I’m ready to move on to other things.”

01:05:55

How to find Virginia + her writing

Chris Sandel: Definitely. Virginia, this has been amazing. I feel like we’ve barely touched on anything from the book. There’s so many other things I would’ve loved to have touched on, but people should definitely go out and read it. Is there anything we didn’t cover that you wanted to mention?

Virginia Sole-Smith: No, this has been a great conversation. I loved all your questions. Thank you.

Chris Sandel: The final one is just where can people find out more about you? I’ll put all the links and everything in the show notes.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Terrific. The book is anywhere you get books, The Eating Instinct. I am on Instagram and Twitter @v_solesmith, no hyphen. It was a bad handle invented before podcasts. [laughs] It’s hard to say out loud. And you can also find my articles at newyorktimes.com. If you just search my name, you’ll find all the columns. Or my own website is virginiasolesmith.com. You’ll find links to everything there. That makes it easy.

Chris Sandel: Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Thank you so much.

Chris Sandel: That was my conversation. I really like Virginia and what we got to cover. It definitely felt like we could’ve gone on much longer, so hopefully there will be a Round 2 sometime, and sometime soon.

01:07:08

Chris’s recommendation for this week

I have a recommendation of something to check out if you’re interested. I recently watched the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix, and I thought it was really great. I’d actually seen it on Netflix for a while when I’d been trying to figure out what to watch and flicking through, and I kept skipping over it. I think Netflix does do lots of good content, but some of their original content can be so-so, and sometimes their documentaries haven’t been amazing – although there’s been lots of very, very good things. But yeah, for some reason I kept skipping over it.

But then I found out who was behind the documentary and who was featured in it, and that really changed my mind. Tristan Harris is the founder of the Centre for Humane Technology, and I’ve heard him on podcasts before and liked what he had to share and talk about. So when I found out that he was the main voice of the documentary, that changed my mind and I was really in.

But it was not just him; it was other people like Jaron Lanier and Roger McNamee and Renee DiResta and Jonathan Hight and lots of other people I’d heard on other podcasts talking about the issue before.

Really the crux of the documentary is about how social media and the internet is reshaping our world, and not for the better. The increase in fake news, in polarisation, in anxiety, in teen suicide, in the rise of populist movements and how bad actors can destabilise democracy, and really get at, is there even a very idea of truth, or do we all have our own truths?

For me, I had heard so many of the people who were talking in the documentary on podcasts before, so it wasn’t a huge amount of new information, but I think it was put together really well and it got the points across well. It was done in a manner that I think could be very eye-opening, particularly if you haven’t been following this for any length of time.

Interestingly, I’ve noticed over the last couple of years how many of my friends have come off of social media. I’m in the late thirties/early forties bracket in terms of my group of friends, and lots of them have not just come off it in terms of deleting it from their phone, but just completely shut down their accounts. And really, if it wasn’t for Seven Health having a presence on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and therefore me needing to have an account, I really would’ve done the same.

After finishing watching the documentary with Ali, we both went through our phones and made lots of changes. I’ve turned off all my notifications. I deleted the news app. I already had removed Facebook from my phone, but have now done the same with Instagram. I already had Instagram on like page 5, so I barely ever checked it, but it was more about removing temptation in its entirety. I would actually love to go back to one of the old Nokia phones where you really couldn’t do a lot on it, but for now, changing notifications and removing certain apps is a starting point.

As a father, it is really scary thinking about where things will be in 10 years’ time when Ramsay is a teenager, and 10 years, with the way that technology is changing so rapidly, is a huge amount of time. I have no idea where things will be and how they’ll look, but the hope is that with a documentary like this, things can start to change for the better. But I don’t know how hopeful I am about that on the macro level of things going in the right direction. It might be much more about managing things on the micro level to get things to work as best as it can.

The documentary is called The Social Dilemma. It’s on Netflix, and I highly recommend checking it out.

As I said at the top, Seven Health is taking on new clients for the final time this year, and we have just two spots left at the time of recording this.

If you are struggling with disordered eating and eating disorders, being stuck in quasi-recovery, wanting to get over dieting, wanting to conceive or get your period back or really any of the other topics that we cover on this show, then I would love to help. You can head over to seven-health.com/help for more information.

That is it for this week’s show. I will catch you next week. Take care and I’ll see you then.