How to Have the Fat Talk

Monday, April 29

$150/ticket

$500/institutional or group ticket

5:00 – 6:30 PM EDT
4:00 – 5:30 PM CDT

Genre: Culture

By the time they reach kindergarten, most kids believe that “fat” is a bad word. By middle school, more than a quarter of them have gone on a diet. What are parents, educators and healthcare providers to do?

In this 90 minute talk, journalist Virginia Sole-Smith exposes the daily onslaught of fatphobia that kids face from school, sports, doctors, diet culture and our own family dinner tables. She draws on two decades of health reporting to elucidate the murky relationship between weight and health, as well as interviews with hundreds of parents and kids to offer strategies for how we can change the conversations we have around weight, health and self-worth.

Parents and other caregivers will learn to reckon with their own body biases, identify diet culture, and empower their kids to navigate this challenging landscape. Sole-Smith offers a provocative new approach for thinking about food and bodies, and a way for us all to work toward a more weight-inclusive world.

About Virginia Sole-Smith

As a journalist, Virginia Sole-Smith has reported from kitchen tables and grocery stores, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid’s tail.

Virginia is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Her work also appears in the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and other publications. She writes the newsletter Burnt Toast, where she explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health, and hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast. Virginia lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband, two daughters, a cat, a dog, and way too many houseplants.