Show Notes
Divesting from aggro fitness motivation with weight neutral trainer Lauren Leavell. You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my conversation is with Lauren Leavell. Lauren is a weight neutral fitness professional and content creator. She focuses on creating inclusive environments for movement and exercise to help clients feel strong and confident, and previously joined us on the podcast back in 2023. Lauren is an oasis in a sea of toxic online fitness and wellness culture. And it has been super toxic lately! So I asked Lauren to come on and chat with us about the recent dramas happening on Tiktok and Instagram. Yes, we get into the girl who said nobody over 200 pounds should take Pilates. We also talk about how to stay grounded when this noise is happening online, and how to seek out inclusive movement spaces—whatever that looks like for you. Today’s episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you. PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show! Episode 197 Virginia Lauren, it’s so great to have you back on the podcast! It was one of my favorite conversations. It was two years ago that you were here before, I think. Lauren I know! Honestly, we could have a conversation once a month about toxic fitness stuff. Virginia There’s always something. For anyone who missed your first appearance and has missed the 72,000 times I say “I love Lauren’s workouts,” can you introduce yourself? Lauren I am Lauren Leavell. I am a certified personal trainer and group fitness instructor. I’ve been doing that for almost a decade at this point, which is so wild. I’m not tired of it yet, which is amazing for me. I have a virtual program online, and Virginia is a member of tat community. Virginia A groupie. Lauren Honestly, yes. Love that. I teach live classes and on demand classes. All of them are body neutral, and most of them are lower impact, because we’re here for a good time and a long time. And I also have private training clients who I program Stronger Together workouts for. When I’m not doing that, I’m apparently complaining on the Internet. Well, I try not to complain too much on the Internet. And stalking cats in my neighborhood. Virginia You are my favorite Internet cat lady. Lauren Huge, huge accolades here. Virginia Favorite Internet cat lady. That should be in your bio. And you are talking to us from France right now! Do you want to talk about that? Lauren I’m really leaning into my Sagittarius lifestyle. I just picked up my life in Philadelphia and decided to move to France. People keep asking me, why? And my answer is, why not? My partner and I are child-free except for our two beautiful cat daughters. But they’re pretty easy to move. So we packed up our lives and moved to France. We are still really new here, really getting into it. And I’m genuinely just so excited for all the new stimuli. Virginia Of course for folks listening to this episode, it is now mid-June, so we’re going to talk about something that happened a month ago, and it is forgotten in the attention span of the Internet. But I still think it’s very important to record for posterity that this happened. So Lauren, can you walk us through what I’m going to call Pilatesgate.
Lauren Pilatesgate occurred when a woman decided to come on TikTok, and really just rant. You can tell that she was a little bit amped up. She was talking about how she did not believe that people in larger bodies—specifically, if you are over 200 pounds—you should
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We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay and it’s time for your April Just Toast episode! This is a special episode because we recorded in person! I traveled to New Mexico to see Corinne, have new Burnt Toast headshots taken and visit Meow Wolf with my kiddo and my boyfriend. It was a glorious trip and I'm excited to share some of the behind the scenes with you today. In this episode we're talking about: ⭐️ Why it's so hard to have your photo taken. ⭐️ Thin friends not putting their fat friends on the grid. ⭐️ The art of a good selfie. One audio note: our Airbnb in Santa Fe was an acoustical odyssey, so please bear with us on the sound quality. You need to be a paid Just Toast subscriber to listen to this full conversation. Membership starts at just $5 per month! Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/virginiasolesmith/join. Sign up for just $5! Join Just Toast! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈 Episode 241 Transcript Virginia We're recording in person from an Airbnb in Santa Fe, New Mexico. If the audio is not perfect today, it's not Tommy's fault. It's that we're doing it in an adobe room and that creates some echoes. Corinne We have covered the floors with soft things, but it's still very echo-y. Virginia So bear with us. This is only our second ever in person episode, so it's going to be a really fun one. This is a Just Toast episode. As we explained on our previous Extra Butter episode, we're no longer calling it the Indulgence Gospel, although we always will in my heart. We're trying to make it clear what kind of episode you're listening to. So if you are listening to this whole episode right now, you are a Just Toast subscriber, which means you are a regular paid subscriber tier. There's also our premium tier, Extra Butter, for a little more money where you can get behind every single paywall. Whichever tier you are, we're very happy you're here. Corinne We're going to talk about something we did yesterday. Virginia Corinne and I did something together for the first time. Corinne If you're a longtime listener subscriber, you may have noticed that we have no photos together. Virginia Except one we took in a hot tub two years in Hot Springs. Corinne Yesterday, while Virginia is here in New Mexico, we got some photos taken by a photographer named Molly Haley. Virginia Who is an old friend of yours. Corinne We went to middle school and high school together. Virginia Since we were doing a photo shoot, we thought, well, we've got to talk about photos on the podcast because it's a whole thing. Corinne Photos can be hard! Virginia I would amend that sentence and say photos are hard. Corinne Although your child would disagree. Virginia My 8-year-old keeps telling us that that's a silly thing to think and photos are great and they love having their photo taken. Corinne They're not wrong. Virginia No, it's a lot of stuff. A lot of diet culture noise. It's a lot of being seen, I think. Being perceived. Corinne Would you say that you've struggled with photos?