Latest news with #CaseyJohnston
The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
‘If dieting works, where's the evidence?' How weightlifting helped Casey Johnston love her body again
Before Casey Johnston started weightlifting, she had assumed it was the preserve of 'people who already had some sort of talent or need for it – like you're a football player, a firefighter or in the military, and you need to be physically capable in that specific way'. Getting started seemed intimidating: the technique, the gym environment. Cardio, however, had always felt intuitive. 'You go out the door and you run until you can't run any more, and that's it,' she says. As was the idea that it should be punishing. As a younger woman always obsessively trying to lose weight, she ran half-marathons in sub-zero temperatures and feared eating even the calories burned by any run in case it 'undid' her hard work – never mind how cold her extremities and faint her head. After years on the exertion/deprivation treadmill, Johnston felt like a failure: 'Like I'm doing this wrong, or my body is especially difficult to wrangle.' But as a science fiend and engineering graduate, something had started to smell off about the eternal glittering promise of diet and exercise. 'If dieting works, where's the evidence? That was a bit of a watershed moment for me. We're all so used to taking out a lot of guilt [on ourselves] like, I'm not doing it right.' Then, in 2014, Johnston came across a Reddit post by a woman sharing how weightlifting had changed her life: that she felt strong – despite 'only' doing five reps each of a few movements per gym session – and rested heaps and ate tons. Johnston was doubtful but, sick of the relentless misery of endless runs, found her local spit-and-sawdust gym and had a go. Hunger overwhelmed her: how much she immediately needed to eat to replenish her energy and repair her muscles, and how excited she was to do it all again. 'I really did feel different very quickly,' she says. Johnston, who's now 38 and lives in Los Angeles, is my equivalent of her Reddit woman. I also started lifting around then, so badly that I soon slipped a disc from rubbish form. When Johnston started writing a column in 2016, for a now defunct website called the Hairpin, she was the font of good sense I needed, not just about technique, but also the importance of eating 'like a big beautiful horse', of disregarding wellness bullshit, self-punishment and pointless gym machines that only target one muscle at a time. She had a captivatingly funny, no-more-nonsense approach and a talent for accessibly interpreting scientific research. (Her canonical investigation on running without a sports bra convinced me to ditch mine, and I've never looked back.) Like many women who grew up in the 2000s, I'd had a purely poisonous relationship with my body since childhood: I have tried every restriction, had a destructive relationship with the MyFitnessPal food-monitoring app, exercised through injury. No one has had a more positive impact on that relationship than Johnston. So I feel a bit starstruck when she appears on my screen from her home office. In 2021 Johnston's columns became a twice-weekly email newsletter, She's a Beast. She self-published Liftoff, a pdf intro to lifting. Now her first proper book, A Physical Education, is a memoir of how lifting undid a lifetime not just of restrictive diet and exercise, but of her tendency towards self-diminishment from growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother who prized thinness: 'Handling all these weights had taught me to know when I was handling too much,' she writes. Having read her authoritative, disruptive work for years, I was surprised to learn of her self-doubt, and that she had felt confident to start writing about her discoveries in spite of it. 'I developed this compulsion to tell everyone about this thing I had found that changed so fast how I saw myself,' she says. 'That working out could be totally different from how everyone talked about it as this horrible chore. While I was not super-confident in myself, I was very confident in the process.' Johnston grew up in upstate New York, and studied at Columbia University. She graduated in 2010, into the recession. She couldn't get an engineering job and wound up in the media, writing about technology. Her affinity with 'knowing how everything actually works' prompted her to investigate the mechanics behind the muscle. 'There is so much beautiful science here that is not leveraged at all,' she says. 'I felt like everything I'd heard [about my body] was about shame and guilt and reinforced the mystery of this destructive relationship. When I found out there could be something different, I was like, I gotta understand how all of this works.' The most immediate discovery was that the cravings Johnston had always thought were normal – and normal to suppress – disappeared once she started eating 50% more to fuel her workouts and recovery. 'I could spend an entire day thinking: I want cookies, or I can't have cookies. When can I have cookies? How will I acquire them? Which cookies will I get?' she says. 'I thought that was a normal part of being an adult, to deny your cravings as a way of managing your weight, only to find out that it was a medical symptom of being malnourished from dieting for too long, and not even in a way that's putting you on death's door. There's this middle ground where you're substantially mentally and emotionally affected – rigid about rules, hyper-vigilant. Once I started eating more, those things went away without me having to be on my toes all the time. Everything about my mental state changed.' Johnston's writing about the relative peace to be found in weightlifting hits hard because it was so hard won. In one painful chapter, she tries to introduce it to her mum, a 'staunch exerciser' and 'dedicated dieter'. She is resistant, especially to eating more than her minuscule calorific intake: 'No one likes fat old women.' Johnston tells her there are plenty of fat old women that people love. Her mum replies: 'But they wouldn't love me.' Even in the face of hard evidence to the contrary, it's easy to perceive your unruly body as the exception to healthier approaches: that you alone must overexercise and undereat to avoid some perceived disaster. Johnston has been there. 'When I was at a certain point with dieting, and I wanted to do whatever it takes to be not even hot, but physically acceptable, I didn't care what anyone said I should or shouldn't do,' she says. 'As a woman, I felt that people judged my appearance before anything else, and I didn't want that to be the main, valuable thing about myself. To get credit for anything else, I had to manage that first. So I completely understand this mentality of not feeling like you can trust anyone to appreciate you if you don't manage your appearance. All we can do is help people understand they are worth caring for, which I didn't understand about myself for a long time. I had no foundation other than suffering in this way, because that was my mom's relationship to herself. It's not a moral failing to struggle with this stuff, because so many of us do.' In a culture that remains fixated on women's bodies, it's barely possible not to. For a heartbeat around the turn of the 2020s, it looked as though strong might replace skinny as the new ideal; that body positivity or at least neutrality might become the norm. Then GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro swept in and once-buff celebs reverted to waif-like type, and denied that the drugs had anything to do with it. Will the body ideal always arc back towards skinniness? 'If you look back through history, our aesthetic ideals have oscillated a lot,' says Johnston. 'And a lot of times, tellingly, things switch up as soon as everyone gets comfortable or has stuff figured out.' The democratisation of strength training via Instagram and YouTube showed Johnston how happy thousands of people were eschewing thinness as an ideal: 'They just didn't, and still don't, get the same visibility as the people who sow shame and guilt.' And she's sceptical about appetite-suppressing drugs. 'We have yet to see any pharmaceutical or medical 'weight-loss' method reliably bear out as effective, sustainable and lasting. I will be surprised if GLP-1s are the exception.' A Physical Education is a manifesto for learning to reconnect brain and body, to reclaim that relationship from the billion-dollar diet industry that profits from breaking it, keeping us hungry and insecure. 'Lifting was constructive for me because of the atomic unit of it,' says Johnston. 'You're doing a rep or a set, you pause and go, how did that feel? Was that too heavy? Too light? How was my form? The practice of noticing how I felt was something I never had before, and learning to do that within lifting radiated outward into the rest of my life.' Writing the book allowed Johnston to examine why it's so easy to lose body awareness to external forces. 'The stew of our upbringings and cultural messaging can be very overwhelming, and the feedback loops between them are very difficult to see and challenge,' she says. 'It requires having, or building, an immense amount of trust in yourself and in people who actually love and appreciate you, which is exactly what those forces work to destroy. But they wouldn't be working to destroy it if it weren't an immensely powerful thing to have. If there is anything that animates me, it's defiance, so the idea that I'm taking something that many forces don't want me to have only inspires me to fight harder.' Johnston's newsletter readers witnessed her defiance recently when she wrote about weightlifting through her first pregnancy, something women have historically been – incorrectly – uniformly advised against. 'As someone who enjoys bullshit detection, cannot stand being talked down to and generally enjoys being angry and indignant, pregnancy is acres of rich, fertile soil to till,' she wrote at the outset. Her son is now five months old. 'I heard from readers on both ends of the spectrum,' she says. ''Good for you that you're lifting', and others who are like, 'You're actively killing your baby.' I was excited to write about it and assert my experience, for people to know that I'm not speaking to this in an abstract way.' Johnston's work feels to me of a piece with Miranda July's All Fours (her protagonist also takes up weightlifting) and Lucy Jones's radical book on pregnancy and motherhood, Matrescence – startling prompts that have allowed many women to escape traditional gender scripts. At the same time, particularly in the US, there's growing traditionalism around gender and aesthetic norms. It's a striking schism. Johnston makes sense of it by not trying to make sense of it. 'You don't need everyone to be doing the same thing for you to be doing what's right for you,' she says firmly. 'So many people suffer for wanting coherence from these disparate groups who are never going to want the same things, but we're still looking outward for the right answer. That answer is actually to look ye inward. I really suffered for needing to make sense of what everyone is telling me and apply it all, without regard for myself. What I really needed was to develop that regard.' Johnston's regard is powerful, and radiates outward. In A Physical Education, she writes about the importance of rest and that limits aren't 'something to be ashamed of': her evangelism convinced me that I was still wildly overexercising – often 10 times a week – and prompted me to seriously pare back. She never does sponsored content and barely does social media – practically terminal for 'building a brand'. After decades of having my brain scrambled by body positivity, Kayla Itsines and protein mania, Johnston's work feels reassuringly steady, sound – and on your side. 'There's a lot of opportunities to pivot into courting virality,' she says. 'But I understand the much less quantifiable if not more important aspect of feeling like you can trust somebody. I have built credibility by continuing to stay in this lane and say what I'm saying. I think my sheer stubbornness has won people over.' A Physical Education is published by Grand Central on 29 May.
CBC
20-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
Weightlifting made Casey Johnston stronger — in muscle and mind
Social Sharing After years of following diets and running a bunch of half-marathons, journalist and editor Casey Johnston finally hit her goal weight of 138 pounds at age 26. But after all that, she didn't find the happiness or self-confidence she was promised. Instead, she felt deeply hopeless, running on empty. "I realized I was hoping for this moment when everything would feel like it clicked and I would not have to be trying so hard," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "[Where] it didn't take so much effort and so much of my mental energy and physical energy in order to just be comfortable in my body." "But I found that the longer it went on, the more kind of maintenance it seemed to take, the more the more energy and the more attention." That's when she remembered a Reddit post about weightlifting — and decided to try it — despite everything telling her that it wouldn't get her where she wanted to go. Now, years later, she writes about the unexpected healing she gained from weight training in her book A Physical Education. She joined Roach to discuss her journey to finding joy and acceptance in her body and, at the same time, her spirit. Mattea Roach: Where did the priority of optimizing your body come from for you, do you think? Casey Johnston: I tried to take a really honest inventory over the course of writing this book of how my thoughts have been shaped over and my view of myself and working out and food over the course of my life. I mean, there's cultural forces. There's the stuff we read in magazines. The ubiquitous presence of celebrity doctors who present themselves as having all of these quick, easy answers. There were, at the time, women's magazines that had so much to say about the best fruits for weight loss etcetera, but then there was also my own family background. My father was an alcoholic. We all struggled with that. My mother had her own traumatic background and it really created this dynamic of, when I was a child, that I always had to be on my toes. It was very performance-oriented in a way that I felt like I had to maximize my own performance to make everything as okay, as safe as possible for myself. That's not something that kids should have to go through, but it sort of permeated outward into how I saw my place in the world, which was that my role, my job as a person was to be responsive to all of these instructions that I was getting, that I had to produce my own safety and my own place in the world through this hard work of of following all these instructions that people were giving in order for acceptance. So you're in this spot where running, cardio, dieting is not working for you. You come across this Reddit post that clearly made an impact on you about a woman with a different approach to fitness: weightlifting. What sorts of things did she reveal to you about dieting and strength? What spoke to you in her story? When I saw this post I was completely blown away by it because I had always been told that lifting weights will make you bulky, that if you just sort of want to lose weight, that lifting weights is sort of a bridge too far unless you want to be some mega-strength person. So I was fascinated when I came across this post. A lot of times when you see before and after photos, they're about the exaggerated transformation. I was used to seeing infomercials for weight loss products where people had really changed a lot. What was fascinating to me was actually that her body hadn't changed that much. It had changed in minor ways. And I liked the aesthetic changes, but I was like, I've been warned up and down how much lifting weights would do everything you didn't want. She was here doing all of these things that I had been told not to do and she was not only fine, but she was so happy and having a great time. But after looking at her pictures, I was like, she's not that different. And not only that — in her description of what she was doing, she was only working out three times a week. She was only doing five reps at a time of three movements for a few sets and then she was done. So that was taking her 30 minutes. She was eating way more than I was at that time. She was here doing all of these things that I had been told not to do and she was not only fine, but she was so happy and having a great time. Was there ever a point in your lifting journey where you felt concerned that you were pushing yourself just to push yourself like you had been in previous workout routines? What I keep coming back to is that there are so many mechanisms that are inherently about building yourself up, about protecting yourself, and building a relationship with yourself, which really was the most important part of it to me. There's this just atomic unit of lifting that I hadn't experienced in any other physical activity though, you could apply it, just no one does. But it was more built into lifting. You would do a rep or do a set and ask yourself, 'How did that feel?' What was my experience of that? Was the weight too heavy? Was it too light? How did my forearm feel? Do I feel like I'm feeling this in the right muscles? I was able to understand how I was feeling about so many other things in a way that I had never done before. - Casey Johnston And a lot of these questions you don't know the answer at first and that is okay, but you're encouraged in this practice of inquiry of yourself and experience of something and that, to me, was so significant because pursuant to my personal background and pursuant to how a lot of us, but women especially, are treated in cultures to discourage inquiry of your experience. To push down whatever it is that you're feeling because someone else's feelings are more important, because someone else has greater needs than you. And that's not to say that you are the most important person in any room, but that this is an experience of yourself that radiates outward. The experience of asking myself how I felt and lifting encouraged me to develop that practice more outside in the world and I was able to understand how I was feeling about so many other things in a way that I had never done before.
Los Angeles Times
12-05-2025
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Exhausted by cardio? This alternative may be key to a better workout
It was, of all things, a Reddit post that changed the trajectory of Casey Johnston's life in 2013. Up until that point, her workouts and diet were informed by tips from magazines, radio and other media that promised she'd look good and stay fit if she watched her calories and kept up her cardio. But the post she stumbled upon, in which a woman shared results from her new weightlifting workout, seemed to contradict that advice. 'Here's this person who's doing everything the opposite of what I was doing,' Johnston said. 'She wasn't working out that much. She was eating a lot. Her workout seemed pretty simple and short and she was not trying to lose weight. But aesthetically, she looked smaller and more muscular. I though you could only make that change by working out more and more and by eating less.' That was enough to plunge Johnston into an entire subculture of women who were trading the latest exercise trend for a barbell. When Johnston decided to follow in their path, she was not only surprised by how her body changed, but the mental shift that came along with it. That journey inspired her to create her long-running 'She's a Beast' newsletter, and more recently, a book. 'A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting,' (Hachette) charts Johnston's transformation through weightlifting in captivating scientific and emotional detail, articulating the sneaky ways that gender can inform body image, and what women in particular can do to reclaim both their literal and figurative strength. The Times spoke with Johnston, an L.A. resident, about how she braved the weightlifting gym as a beginner, her previous misconceptions about caloric intake and the way building muscle gave her the confidence to reshape other parts of her life. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Your book describes the journey you took to make your body stronger alongside your own mental evolution. Why was it important for you to tell both of those stories? There's so much more interplay between our bodies and our minds and our personal backgrounds than we afford it in our day-to-day life. As I was getting more into health, I realized that I hate the way we talk about it. It's a lot of shoving it into corners. Like, Oh, it should be easy. Just eat less, or just take the stairs instead of the escalator. The more I thought about it, I was like, these are big forces in my life: How I've been made to think about food, or made to think about exercise. Let's say you maybe you don't like your bank, but how often do you deal with your physical bank location? Not that much, twice a year for me, maybe. But stuff like eating breakfast, or you're supposed to work out a few times a week. These are everyday things. It's like a cabinet that you have to open every day, but it's broken. It's worth trying to understand it and have a good relationship with it, because it's something that you're doing all of the time. We're so, so used to shutting it down. Because of that, I spent a lot of time digging into my own personal background, being like: Why do I think about food the way that I do, or exercise? I think that there's an important aspect of accountability there too. You have somebody who's telling you it's easy, like, Just do X, Y, Z. Well, it's not easy for me. Why is it easy for you? Those are valuable questions that people don't ask, or are discouraged from asking. And then when it's not easy for them, they just feel guilty that it's not easy, and then they blame themselves. We are all bringing different stuff to this, so to show somebody what I'm bringing to it will help, hopefully help them think about: What are they bringing to it? Your book talks about the belief system that dictated your exercising and dieting habits. Where did it come from? Magazines, for whatever reason, played such a big role in my conception of how bodies work. But also TV and infomercials and Oprah and even radio. I mentioned in the book a SELF magazine cover. There was a whole study about disordered eating in there, how prevalent it was. It was all the way in the back of the magazine. The conclusions of it were something like, three quarters of women have some form of self-chiding that they're doing about, you know, oh, I ate too much. Or, I need to lose weight, or I hate the way my stomach looks. And that study was not on the cover of the magazine. Everything on the cover was about how to lose weight, how to eat fruit to lose weight, 26 tricks to fit in your bikini. I don't remember what it was exactly, but that was the conversation. Even with awareness of things going on under the surface, it was still this overwhelming amount of messaging about it. It was, of all things, a Reddit post that challenged these ideas for you. What did your subsequent research reveal to you? There were a lot of posts like that. It was not just her, it was this whole subculture. There's this middle ground of people who have this relationship with lifting weights that's more normal than I thought it could ever be. I was used to people lifting weights who need to be extremely strong or extremely huge and muscular, because they're bodybuilders. I had not really heard of anyone lifting weights if they weren't trying to be one or both of those things. So I didn't know that this was an available modality to me. What are some misconceptions that you were harboring about muscles and caloric intake? I had not been aware that by eating too little, you can deplete your muscle mass. Muscle mass is like the main driver of our metabolism. So the less muscle mass you have, the more you destroy through dieting. The lower your metabolism is, the harder it is to lose weight. Also, the longer you've been dieting, the lower your metabolism is going to be. So it becomes this vicious cycle of the more you diet, the harder it is to diet, and the less results — as they would say — you're going to have. I was like, Okay, that's really bad. But you can also work that process in reverse. You can eat more and lift weights and build back your muscle, restore your metabolism. So I had been asking myself, Why does it feel like I have to eat less and less in order to stay the same way? Am I just really bad at this? Am I eating more than I thought? And it was like, No, I'm not. I'm neither bad at this nor imagining it. It's literally how things work. It was very gratifying to find out, but then also a relief that I could undo what I had done. And the way to do it was by lifting and by eating more protein. Muscles are protein, basically. So by lifting weights, you cause damage to your muscles. And after you're done working out, your body goes in and repairs them with all the calories and protein that you eat, and repairs them a little bit better than they were the next time. And you could just do this every time you work out. That same cycle repeats. Your muscles grow back. You get stronger and you feel better. People are really intimidated by gyms. Even more so when it comes to weightlifting in them. You pinpoint this feeling in your book when you describe the moment you realize you would have to 'face the bros.' How were you able to overcome your fears in that department? I wanted so much to see if this worked and how it worked, that I was able to get to the point of OK, I'm gonna give this a try and accept that I might be accosted in an uncomfortable way, or not know what I'm doing, and I will figure it out at some point. I was definitely very scared to go into [a weightlifting] gym, because it felt like the worst thing in the world to be in someone's way, or be using the equipment wrong, or to be perceived at all. But I was buoyed along by wanting to give all of this a chance, and I knew that I couldn't give it a chance if I didn't get in there. That doesn't mean that I didn't get in there and immediately was like, Oh, I'm too afraid to use the spot racks. There was an on-ramp. But what I tell people now in my capacity as an advice-giver is you have to give yourself that space to get used to something. It's like starting a new school or starting a new job. You don't know where the pens are. You have to give yourself a few days to figure it out. You've written so much in your newsletter about functional fitness and compound movements. Why is that so much more valuable than machine lifting? Machines are designed to work usually a limited amount of muscles, or even one muscle at a time. And they do that by stabilizing the weight for you in this machine. You're moving on a gliding track for almost everything you could do. When we are handling weights, loads of things, like a child, groceries, boxes of cat litter, bags of dog food, I hear often you're not doing it on like a pneumatic hydraulic. Your body is wiggling all over the place if you're not strong. So learning to stabilize your body against a weight is sort of an invisible part of the whole task. But that's what a free weight allows you to learn: to both hold a heavy weight and move in a particular direction with it, like squat, up and down with it, but at the same time, your body is doing all this less visible work of keeping you upright, keeping you from falling over. And your body can't learn that when a thing is like holding the weight in position for you while you just move it in this one very specific dimension. One of the uniting themes of your book is this idea of fighting against your body versus trusting it. Would it be safe to say that you began your fitness journey in the former and landed in the latter? I definitely started off fighting my body. I just thought that's what you do with your body. All of the messaging we get, it's like deep in our American culture, this Protestant denial of your physical self and hard work. If it's not hard, you're not doing it right. And I did make a transition from it being hard to listening to my body, trusting it. Just by learning that there was this different dynamic between food, working out and myself that I wasn't aware of for most of my life. And once I got into lifting, I learned that all of these things can work better together. But an integral part of it was: You can't get into lifting without [asking], That rep that I just did — how did that feel? Was it too hard? Was it too easy? Was the weight too high? Is my form weird? I ate a little more yesterday … do I feel better in the gym? Running had been about pushing down feelings in the way that I was accustomed to from my personal life. You're pushing through, you're feeling pain, but trying to ignore it and go faster and faster. It was a lot of like, You got to unplug and disconnect. So lifting, the dynamic of lifting through asking how do things feel, refracted into the rest of my life. How does it feel when somebody doesn't listen to you at work? Or your boyfriend argues with you at a party? Lifting opened me up to this question in general, of how things made me feel. A lot of us are used to thinking of ourselves as your brain is this and your body is that. You are your brain and all of the horrible parts that are annoying and betray you are your body. But there's so much interplay there. It's like your body is the vector that tells you, and when you learn to ignore it, you don't learn to really meaningfully understand your own feelings. I had learned in my life to ignore those signals. When lifting built up my sense of: How does my body feel when it does certain things? It opened up my awareness of the experience of: How does my body feel when bad things or good things happen in the rest of my life?
