Bonus: How To Respond When A Kid Asks ‘Am I Fat?’ with Virgie Tovar

CIHAS pod is on a season break until the new year. But I promised you some fun bonus pods in the meantime, so here goes. Some juicy, unreleased content right here! Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This week, we’re jumping back to my conversation with the fabulous Virgie Tovar from episode 8 (if you haven’t listened to that ‘sode yet, now’s your chance). This snippet didn’t appear in the OG episode, but Virgie shares some really helpful tips on her approach to how to respond to a kid who asks ‘am I fat?’. Virgie sets out seven steps you can take to help you handle this question in an age-appropriate way, and considers things like what if you don’t feel OK about your body, and how you can help the kiddo if they are being bullied about their weight. Spoiler - I might have convinced Virgie to join the ‘Stack. And she might have agreed to write a very cool, fat Christmas love story to share on CIHAS in December 👀 👀Find out more about Virgie here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Here’s the transcript in full.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to a special bonus episode of Can I Have Another Snack? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter, so regular listeners will know that we are currently on a season break, and we'll be back with full episodes in January.I did promise you all a few bonus tidbits from guests that appeared in season one. So today I'm sharing a snippet of conversation with Virgie Tovar who appeared in episode eight of the podcast. Go back and check out the full conversation if you haven't already. It was a really great episode. This snippet didn't appear in the original episode.It's unreleased content where Virgie sets out her approach to how to respond to a kid who asks, am I fat? This is a question that I get asked so often that I wanted to create a dedicated resource that people could access without having to listen to a full hour long episode. It's also something that you might want to share with a co-parent, a spouse, or a partner, or even a grandparent, to help them navigate these conversations too.Virgie sets out seven steps that you can take to help you handle this question in an age appropriate way. And she also considers things like, what if you don't feel okay about your body and how can you help the kiddo if they're being bullied about their weight? So we're gonna get to Virgie in just a second, but first a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? podcast and newsletter are entirely listener and reader-supported. That means I depend on community, meaning you listening right now to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, and you get access to our exclusive community only threads on a Thursday, the full back archive of essays and posts and dear Laura columns where I answer your questions and some bonus audio content, as well as the free posts that go out to everyone. If you value what we do here, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber and helping make this work sustainable. You can also gift a subscription to a friend this holiday season, and we have included a gift certificate for you to print out or email to your friend who is anti-diet curious, or your mom who kind of gets it, but could do with some extra help, or your partner who absolutely does not get it and needs a kick up the ass.So you'll find that linked in the show notes for this episode, at laurathomas.substack.com, and if for any reason you can't pay for a subscription right now, but you would find it helpful to have access to this content, then please email [email protected] with snacks in the subject line and we'll hook you up, no questions asked.And thank you so much to those of you who are already paid subscribers who are helping to make this work sustainable. I really, really appreciate you backing me. All right. Let's get to my chat with Virgie where she is helping us navigate the question of how to respond to a kid who asks, am I fat?MAIN EPISODELaura: So Virgie, something that you published on your newsletter recently that I really loved and would love to hear you maybe like talk us through it, because I thought it was such a helpful guide, was how to respond when a child asks, I guess their parent, or like it could be a spare-ent or a, you know, a family friend who, whomever you are in that child's life, what if they come to you with a question of, am I fat? And kind of thinking about our broader conversation of, of kind of respectful parenting and, and raising kids, you know, free from diet culture, free from body shame, how would you go about responding to that question?Virgie: Yeah, I mean, I kind of walkthrough in the article seven steps, like step one. I really love that because it really helps people kind of visualise like what...