Fitness Doesn't Have to Be about Denial and Shame

Scientific American

07-05-2025

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Just to give you a heads-up, we'll be talking about physical fitness today. We'll touch on topics such as disordered eating and intentional weight loss.
Social media is full of fitness influencers promising 'bikini bodies' and hawking fat-burning cardio routines, especially for women and femme-presenting people. But if you know where to look, you can find folks who are doing things differently: exercising slowly, lifting heavy and getting strong—a process that often involves fewer workouts and a lot more calories.
One of the most popular figures in the femme lifting space is writer Casey Johnston. Her book A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting just came out, and she's here to tell us more about how strength training can change our relationship with fitness, body image and even our own minds.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Hey, thanks so much for coming on to chat.
Casey Johnston: Hi, thanks for having me.
Feltman: So I would love to start by asking: What misconceptions did you have about lifting and strength training before you got into it?
Johnston: I think a lot of the same things that a lot of people have. I thought that if I started lifting weights, it would make me bulky instantly, and I thought it was only for people who really needed to be strong, like, in a professional way, like if you were an Olympic athlete or an NFL running back, or you have some sort of strength-oriented job. And the other misconception I had was that muscle is always just sort of there on your body, waiting for you to lose all of the body fat in order for the muscle to suddenly show through. And I didn't know that your body can sort of consume muscle or your—the amount of muscle in your body can fluctuate based on what you're doing and it is possible to diet too much, for instance, and lose muscle mass ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: As you do that.
Feltman: Yeah, so what changed your mind?
Johnston: The big event in my life was that I found a post on Reddit where a woman was talking about her strength-training progress, and she was having what looked to me like a very sort of unusual to me at the time relationship with lifting ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnson: Where she was only going a few days a week. She was eating a lot of food, and she wasn't that strong; she was, like, strength—she was clearly not the type of person that I thought of at the time as somebody who lifted weights. But she was having a great time. She was feeling so much better. She was enjoying eating. And what was most important to me at that time was she was getting these physical results that I had always been pursuing with all of my weight-loss activities, where she had lost some body fat and she was looking more, quote, unquote, 'toned,' as we might say.
And after all my years of running and dieting—and I was putting so much into this, so many hours ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: So much effort—I was like, 'What, what the heck?' that this lady is doing this with, you know, half the time investment, she's eating way more, she's committing all of these, quote, unquote, 'sins' that I thought were impossible for me to do as a woman in the world, and here she's doing them all. And not only is she doing them all, she's getting all of the results that I was never able to get.
Feltman: Mm. So I've been following your work for a long time, but for listeners who aren't familiar with you yet could you tell us a little bit about the trajectory that followed after that?
Johnston: Yeah, after that I decided I had to try this magical set of activities that I had no real awareness of before. And so I got into lifting weights, started eating more, and I was like, 'I feel like I've tried everything else. Nothing else is really clicking for me.' And pretty quickly I realized I love this style of workout. I love how I feel when I eat [laughs] and then when I go to the gym and I'm fed and I have all this energy and I can do my workouts and I'm getting stronger, like, steadily. It just felt incredible.
And from that point, after I lifted a couple of years, I started writing a column about strength training for other people, an advice column called Ask a Swole Woman. That column has been published by a few outlets at this point, and then I started a newsletter based off of that column that was a little more expansive, and now here I am: I'm writing books and writing a newsletter and talking to you and all this good stuff.
Feltman: You've done a lot of research on lifting, nutrition, fitness and diet culture in general. What things have you learned that have surprised you along the way?
Johnston: I think the biggest surprise to me was: there were so many things about my existence before getting into lifting that I thought were just sort of par for the course of human existence, where you have cravings for food, but you have to, like, work really hard to deny them. You have to be always pursuing weight loss in order to be healthy. And I learned that not only are those things not true, but that constant sort of chronic dieting is bad for your body in the way that I—your muscle can be dieted away, and that can become a vicious cycle: the more muscle you lose, the less ability your body has to burn calories and maintain all of your sort of biological equilibrium and—but the harder you're going to try to lose weight because of that.
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: So it can become this yo-yoing cycle. It's not just up and down in weight; it's that your body composition is changing in such a way that it makes it harder and harder to do each time ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: Which is a little different than I had thought of things or how I was made to understand it, which is that, 'Oh, you lose weight, and then you gain the weight back.' It's like there's a more insidious cycle going on there.
Feltman: Yeah.
Johnston: The other thing I learned: I had these cravings, and I thought just denying cravings, having to work really hard to not eat food or to really want food, be thinking about food a lot but having to push it away was just part of how things are. Later I learned from this experiment the Minnesota starvation experiment is how it's colloquially known—where they put a bunch of men on a diet for a few months and found that, among other things, their mental state was very badly affected. They became really rigid, attached to rules, very fixated on food. And I found in my own experience that when I started eating more—not just, like, endlessly more but a modest amount more to support my lifting—that the cravings just went away. So much of the mental difficulty that I was experiencing was likely a downstream effect of not eating enough, not sort of taking basic care of myself, and I had never really made that connection between my mental state and the sort of input of food.
Feltman: What do you think is missing or wrong in the way that most people frame fitness and wellness?
Johnston: I think that there's a big emphasis on hard work ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: Which is par for the course of American culture. It's sort of like: 'You earn everything that you deserve'—big quotes around all of this—'by working really hard, bearing down.' And sort of conversely: 'If you don't work hard for it, then you don't deserve it,' which is interesting because in our culture a lot of things come from different privileges [laughs] of different kinds. But laying that aside there's a lot of emphasis on—or at least, especially when I was getting into lifting—'no pain, no gain,' and 'sweat is your fat crying,' and these kinds of things that are focused on: if you're not enjoying it, if you're not in pain, you're not working hard, and you're not gonna get anything out of this ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: That pain and suffering are one-to-one with 'results,' quote, unquote, and being deserving of the things that you're doing.
And I subscribed to this ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: With my running, where I was always pushing myself harder and harder, running farther and farther, eventually getting into half-marathons, hoping to sort of reach a point where everything was, like, a little more balanced, that I didn't even have to think about it all so much, and I only felt like I had to think about it more and more.
When I got into lifting I found that the workouts were such that—there's a lot of emphasis in lifting on recovery. If you lift on one day, you need to rest enough the next day in order to be able to lift again the day after that. Your muscles are built in this time when you are resting, really; your body is sort of gathering its resources, repairing your muscles, making them a little bit stronger for the next time that you lift weights. So if you don't give your body those resources to repair the muscles, if you don't give it the time to repair them, it's a waste of a workout. Like, there's no point in lifting but not doing those things. So I had never thought of things that way—that all of these things could exist in balance—and that was not the emphasis that I had been taught about exercise.
Feltman: What are some of the most interesting things you've learned about the human body over the course of doing this work?
Johnston: I feel like I learned that there's so much more interplay between the brain and the body than I ever considered. I mean, it's—it feels, in one way, a bit silly to say because it's like, 'Obviously, your brain is part of your body; of course there's interplay. Your brain controls everything.' I learned that there's sort of messaging that goes back and forth between your muscles and your brain. Your body informs your thoughts in so many ways.
There is some research that I got into while writing the book about the experience of interoception, how our almost unconscious processes in our body influence our feelings and our ability to perceive those feelings. A really good example is: let's say you get jump-scared online ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: By one of those, like, creepy thing jumps out at you and screams. Before you even have the thoughts to interact your body is reacting: Your breath is quickening. Your heart increases. Your muscles tense up. This is all feedback that gets passed back to your brain and informs your emotional state, and over time that can become its own vicious cycle of—it's sort of how trauma happens—the interplay between your brain and your body and how you're able to perceive those signals, or in, in certain cases of trauma you learn to tune out your body because the signals are so threatening and you are kind of like, 'I'm not gonna survive unless I sort of push all of this away and down.'
So reattuning to those signals is a whole process but one that I found lifting was super helpful with because it was this really focused almost practice in a way that I didn't think of, where it's asking, 'You did a rep, you did a set, you went to the gym, and you ate more—how did that feel? How does your body feel when that happens?' And I was so used to pushing away how my body felt and trying to tune it out, but in lifting all of that is necessary information that informs how you kind of do everything else in the gym. And that taught me to attune to my body in all of these other situations where my body is telling me something about how I feel and I need that information [laughs] in order to make decisions that are helpful to me.
Feltman: Yeah. What advice do you have for people listening who think this all sounds interesting but, like, really don't know how to engage with strength training or, you know, get off the endless cardio train?
Johnston: Well, I would say read my book because it will explain all of this. I think, genuinely, this book is for people who maybe have never known how to approach this stuff or even why you would bother with it if you're not somebody who is sort of oriented towards ...
Feltman: Mm.
Johnston: Sports already. It's like, 'What does physical activity and strength training, in particular, have to offer someone where that's not their thing, it's not their job?' There's a whole slew of things that are interesting, and even if you never put a foot through the door—I'm not trying to, like, indoctrinate anyone—but it's all good information to know and you can bring it into the rest of your life in lots of ways.
But I have another book that's more specifically about getting into lifting, a beginner lifting program called Liftoff: Couch to Barbell, that's for people who have never lifted weights before. So you start with body weight and just stuff in your house, and it's very easy—starts easy and works you up to using weights.
But in general I think it's worth acknowledging that it is difficult; a lot of us have unacknowledged history—hang-ups or issues or a lot of things that have affected us with our bodies that are difficult to unpack or confront. And so it's worth acknowledging that with yourself: that there's so much that we absorb over the course of our lives into our bodies and brains that are affecting how we think about this stuff.
It's the marketing world that wants you to exist in this tension: 'Oh, it's simple, it's simple, and if you can't make it simple, there's something wrong with you.' There's not anything wrong with us; it's that our bodies need this consideration and space and time, and it's worth it because your body is literally where you live—you will never escape your body, and your body is not easy to ignore in the way that I often hoped that it would be, but once I was able to give it a little more room I found that there was this whole relationship with myself that I was missing out on.
So I think these things aren't gonna come all at once, and so much of it is just about having curiosity and openness and focusing on your experience of these things and not what someone else says you should be doing. I have my suggestions, but they're just suggestions; it's take or leave. If it works for you, good. If it doesn't, something else might. But the whole thesis of this is that your physical experience matters—and not just in a abstract way but in a way that's very important to each of us.
Feltman: Thank you so much for coming on to talk today. This has been great.
Johnston: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Feltman: That's all for today's episode. Don't forget to check out Casey's book A Physical Education. We'll be back on Friday to take an exclusive look at a particle collider.
While I've got you I have just a quick favor to ask: We're running a listener survey to find out what people like about Science Quickly and what we might be able to improve. If you complete it this month, you'll be entered to win some sweet SciAm swag. Go to ScienceQuickly.com/survey to help us out. We'll also include a link in this episode's show notes.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.