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Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin from the WNYC and Gothamist newsrooms, filling in for Brian who's off today. It's been over a year since we've had to think about things like being "beach body ready", or what a critical relative might say about our weight at a family gathering. Though it's great we get to soon see our relatives, it's less exciting to think that anxiety around weight and our bodies will return too.

Many media outlets are making that anxiety worse, publishing stories about how much weight people gained over quarantine and diet companies are cashing in on that narrative, offering promotional deals to help people lose that dreaded COVID-15.

While it's true many of us have turned to comfort eating over the past year and many of our bodies may have changed due to being inside and being under enormous stress, it's important to remember that a changing body does not equal failure.

Here, with me now is someone who thinks about this a lot, Virginia Sole-Smith. She's a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, the author of the book, The Eating Instinct, and the newsletter, Burnt Toast. Hi, Virginia. Welcome to WNYC.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Thank you so much for having me.

Brigid Bergin: In addition to the past year being isolating and tragic for obvious reasons, how much do you think it's also been a relief for some people not to have to constantly worry about weight judgments or "measuring up to certain standards"?

Virginia Sole-Smith: Absolutely. This has come up a lot in my reporting. There was a lot of talk in the beginning about everyone stopping wearing pants and switching to sweat pants and comfy things. A lot of folks said, "It was really nice not to be on constricting clothes and to just let my body breathe and let my body be and not have that anxiety around having to look a certain way when we go out into the world." I think it's been a real relief for folks.

At the same time, I will say things like Zoom have also increased some body anxiety. I've certainly talked to folks saying, this checking of your appearance on-- When you spend a lot of your day on Zoom, it's like you're looking at yourself a lot more than you ever did. It's a mixed bag. I think that relief has been there for a lot of folks, which is why now there's so much anxiety about re-entry.

Brigid Bergin: You wrote recently, in an article, "I've decided, when it's safe to re-enter the world, my sweatpants are coming with me, because I'm not planning to get my "pre-pandemic body" back, and you don't have to either." I think some people might hear that and think that's a radical idea. Is that right?

Virginia Sole-Smith: Oh, yes. I think it strikes a lot of people as very radical and makes people very nervous. We so often think of weight gain as a sign of failure, as a sign of giving up, letting ourselves go. That's the cultural narrative we've been sold and we forget that, often, whatever is happening with your weight is just, at most, a symptom of the larger things that you're dealing with.

We are surviving a collective global trauma right now. If our bodies are changing, it may be a symptom of how this larger trauma is impacting us, but changing our weight is not going to heal our trauma, it's not going to make any of the things we're all struggling with easier. It's only going to give us this new thing to obsess over and the thing to try to measure up to that's going to be really difficult.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, I want to open up the phones for anyone out there who is feeling anxious about their weight and body post-quarantine. I'm going to throw myself in that category. The numbers 646-435-7280. Did you feel a brief reprieve from judgment over your weight or appearance over the past year, and are you feeling sad to see that aspect of the pandemic go?

If your weight or appearance did change over the past year, how do you feel about it? Is that anxiety making it more difficult to see people that you would otherwise love to see, or are you embracing your new size and thinking it's a marker of a difficult year that you and your body survived? The number's 646-435-7280.

My guest has also written a lot about kids and diet and culture. We also want to hear from you if you've had any stresses or successes around how you talk to your kids about food and weight this year. Has all this time together been good for your eating habits as a family or has pandemic anxiety made meal planning and structure around food more difficult? The number's 646-435-7280 and my guest is Virginia Sole-Smith. She's a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, the author of the book, The Eating Instinct, and the newsletter, Burnt Toast.

Virginia, in recent months, major news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post reported on a study that found that Americans gained one and a half pounds per month on average during the pandemic. You and others found faults in the data, but also in how the data was reported. Can you walk us through that?

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes, absolutely. The thing about that study, and most of the other studies that have come out, saying, "Look how much weight everybody's gained," is, we're relying on self-reported data. That's a very unreliable way to collect this data because we don't know that everybody has the same scale in their house that they got on at the same time of day-- There are so many ways that the data is not being collected in a very systematic and scientific way.

The other thing is, I believe that study was the one that framed the question as, "Did you gain more weight than you intended?" Which is a very loaded way to ask that question in a culture where we never intend to gain weight. We're told never to do that.

I'm actually surprised the answer wasn't like 90% of people saying yes because I don't think we ever really give ourselves permission to let our bodies change. I think that's a big piece of the puzzle.

Speaking more broadly, we're not going to have clear data on what happened with Americans' weight for quite a while. The numbers we really look to are the data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A lot of that data they simply couldn't do in the last year. They do these surveys every two years but they weren't able to be out in the field collecting their data in the same way. We may not have the solid numbers on what's happened for a while.

The other thing is, again, to say, "Okay, even if as a population we all gained weight, what does that mean for you as an individual?" Even as a population, we gained weight, as a population, we survived a pandemic. That is the real victory here. We have to-- These headlines that really beef this up as this huge trauma, I just think are so missing the point. We know what the trauma is. The trauma is how many hundreds of thousands of Americans we've lost and how the rest of us are trying to go on and rebuild.

Again, to make it all about weight, it completely makes sense. It's what our culture tells us to do when we're stressed out, particularly women, particularly parents are told to really obsess over food and body size, but it's not a helpful obsession. It's a really, really harmful obsession.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to the phones. Morgan in Clark, New Jersey. Welcome to WNYC.

Morgan: Hi, thanks for taking my call. So much of what you're saying is resonating with me because leading up to the pandemic, I was on a personal health journey, trying to heal my relationship with food but I also lost close to 100 pounds, and I felt so empowered. Then the pandemic happened and my mental health was like out the window, and I regained 50 pounds, and I'm struggling to be compassionate with myself. I feel that anxiety.

Brigid Bergin: Oh, for sure.

Morgan: Worrying about seeing your family again, even in the Zoom, "Nice double chin". [chuckles] [crosstalk] It's so hard to not assign value.

Virginia Sole-Smith: I think that's a really common experience, Morgan. Thank you for sharing that. Again, I just go back to this concept of, "Look at what you have survived in the last year?"

Anything you had to do for your mental health in the last year, whether that was more comfort eating, more sleep, more anything, that was a good choice for your health. That was a health-promoting decision because you made it here and that's also not to say that folks who didn't survive the pandemic made bad decisions. It's just to say, like, "You have done what you needed to do to survive in the last year," and there's really a lot to be proud of there.

What I think we all need to do is separate this idea that our value is defined by the weight. The weight may have changed, your worth has not changed. That's a really important message to keep coming back to.

When we think about seeing new people, one thing I think we all can be doing is checking in with people ahead of time and just saying, "I'm not feeling so great about my body right now. This has been such a weird year. I can't wait to see you but I am feeling nervous about my body."

I'm betting most people, if they're people who love you and support you, are going to, A, probably say, "Yes, me too," and also going through that, or B, just be able to sort of try to meet you in a more supportive place, especially-- We all have people in our lives, whether it's a mom or a grandparent or another relative who's prone to making body comments. If you can set a boundary upfront and just say, "I can't wait to see you. I'm so excited. I don't want to talk about bodies." I think that's a really important form of self-care right now.

Brigid Bergin: Morgan, thank you so much for calling and sharing your story. Congratulations on surviving this pandemic as we are celebrating we all have done this past year. Irene in Weehawken. Welcome to WNYC. Hi.

Irene: Oh, good. Hi. I have a lot of identification with all these components. I have a history of recovering from disordered eating and body stuff and mind stuff and obsession compulsion. I noticed, on one hand, a lot of gratitude for the absorption of many of the things that I'm hearing are useful, which doesn't mean that they didn't still come to my mind, but that I'm identifying with the acceptance and compassion that I'm hearing as a tool.

Also, I would say, my experience has been not in tremendous-- I didn't regress to old ways of the patterns of my disorder, but under-moving has been something that has been my not silver lining this year. Yes, I'm older, I hit Medicare in pandemic year, and I had found ways of moving at a gym and a pool situation that had become-- I was willing to do and useful, and that went out the window.

I noticed my resistance to going out and just moving for its own sake or even staying in and picking up some weights, that's still something I found resistance to. That territory, I could note, but also I benefited from the Zoom communities of healing, of recovery communities that became accessible during this time, which probably really helped me navigate, so I'd identify with those.

Brigid Bergin: Irene, thank you so much. I know it's complicated, and there's no, seems like, one version of what works and what supports us. Let's go to Arthur in Brooklyn. Arthur, welcome to WNYC.

Arthur: Hi, how are you? Thanks for taking me.

Brigid Bergin: Thank you for joining us.

Arthur: I'm in my mid-30s. I have a forward-facing job as an educator. I've recently, literally just at the beginning of the month, went back into the classroom for the first time and was able to see my students.

Over the course of this pandemic, I put on about two sizes I had before and I always consider myself to be a relatively fit person, but over the course of the pandemic, I feel like I came down to maybe-- It's like the worst shape of my life. Hearing my students make comments, nothing like particularly too snide, but it's definitely sticking in my head.

As I'm getting to this point in my age, as the world is opening back up, and I have to go and buy new clothes and see that my body doesn't look the same. Just thinking about, "Is this the second half of my life? Is this what I'm looking forward to?" Because I honestly don't know-- I don't know if it's because of COVID why I don't feel the push to really go out and exercise and push myself.

I'm just really just balancing that, the ideas from outside, my own internal ideas about myself and what I should look like, and those expectations, and is bringing a lot more anxiety than I thought beforehand. I didn't take much thought into it. I guess it wasn't until I was actually in front of students and people are seeing me rather than behind a screen, where it really started to be a thought.

Brigid Bergin: Thank you so much for calling in and sharing that story. I suspect it's something that a lot of listeners can relate to as we are beginning to re-emerge, whether it's going back to workplaces or going back to see family and friends and that.

Particularly, one of the things you mentioned, that idea of going into the closet, finding clothes that don't fit and having to decide do you go out and buy new clothes? Virginia, you talked to an eating disorder specialist and fashion blogger about this question. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Virginia Sole-Smith: Yes. I think it's really important to whatever extent your budget allows, even if it's just one pair of pants, one outfit, to invest in clothes that fit your body where it is right now. I think so often clothes are a really big piece of our trauma, we hold on to them for a long time, and that it's holding on to these expectations of what your body used to be.

When you frame that as like, "Is this the second half of my life?" I immediately thought, maybe yes, but also, quite likely, no. Bodies are always changing, and we're often told that our body shouldn't change, that we should somehow be thin in high school and be thin forever and be really fit and maintain this always, and that's a myth sold to us by the diet industry. That's not how human bodies work.

Anyone who's had a baby, aging, there's all these different things that happen to our bodies that change it. I think it's really important to say, "Okay, this is where my body is right now," let's not get hung up on what's going to happen in the future, because that's not really in our control. It also might be helpful to understand that how you eat and exercise, only impacts your body shape so much.

About 60% of our body size is determined by genetics. Larger environmental factors such as global pandemics have a big control over these things too. As much as you're sold this idea. They're like, "This is my problem to get out and fix," we know that 95% of dieters regain the weight they lose within the next five years.

We know that there's no safe and durable way to lose weight in the long term, and so there's really no need to be pursuing that goal. That treatment plan is not going to work, investing in where you are right now and how you can feel good about the body you have now, I think is a much better way forward.

Brigid Bergin: Let's, quickly-- We have time for one more question. We have Paula in Westchester. Paula, welcome to WNYC. What's your question for Virginia?

Paula: Hi, Virginia. I was dealing with a child with an eating disorder right before we went into quarantine. That quarantine actually really supported the healing and getting back into healthy eating. I'm worried about two things, one is, what really is healthy eating? There's emotionally healthy eating, and then there's nutritionally healthy eating. I feel like the emphasis we place on kids obesity and healthy eating really has fed into teen eating disorders.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Absolutely.

Paula: As we go back to normal life, how do I not control every bite of food that goes into his mouth? How do I trust him to continue on a healthy eating trajectory? There's two things going on. Sorry to bombard you.

Virginia Sole-Smith: No, you're hitting on really important issues. The pandemic has definitely fueled a rise in eating disorders, particularly for teenagers for a lot of reasons. Kids who are already struggling may be struggling much more now that they're now navigating this new transition.

You're also right that being home was really good for a lot of folks in active eating disorder recovery, especially if they're doing a family-based treatment program, where you were just in your house and just navigating food in the smaller way. To whatever extent, you can reach out to your treatment team and get support for navigating this transition. I think this is going to be a really challenging time for a lot of folks.

I do want to speak to your question about emotionally healthy eating versus physically healthy eating. These two concepts should not be as diametrically opposed as diet culture tells us they are. The concept I encourage folks to look into is intuitive eating, the book by Evelyn Tribole is a great place to start.

This is not the approach I would suggest for someone in active recovery for a restrictive eating disorder, they usually need a lot more support, but for people who are trying to recover from dieting in general or who are in a more solid place with their recovery, this is a great place to go because it talks about how you start to listen to your body and honor your body cues and that guides you towards a nutritional way of eating that's also emotionally supportive.

Brigid Bergin: We'll have to leave it there with Virginia Sole-Smith. She's a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, the author of the book, The Eating Instinct, and the newsletter, Burnt Toast. You've been listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, WNYC's Senior Political Correspondent, filling in for Brian today. Will talk to you again tomorrow.

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