Latest news with #CaseyJohnston
Vogue
4 days ago
- Health
- Vogue
Scared to Start Strength Training? I Was Too
I had arrived late and was scrambling. Where were the weights, and how many did I need? Was I feeling confident enough to grab the 10-pounders or should I risk silent ridicule from my fellow Body Sculpt attendees and retrieve a 4-pound set? 'That's my spot,' another student—short, impressive muscles—snapped. It was my first class, and I needed help. After more than three decades, I wanted my body to do something new and hard, but my anxious mind was not cooperating. I had started to see it everywhere, the message that women need to be stronger. In May, the writer Casey Johnston released a memoir called A Physical Education, about trading constant diets for weight lifting and discovering herself in the process, a real-life counterpart to Miranda July's fictional narrator in All Fours, whose journey of self-actualization includes extramarital affairs and kettlebells. This summer, longtime Wall Street Journal reporter turned professional bodybuilder Anne Marie Chaker published Lift: How Women Can Reclaim Their Physical Power and Transform Their Lives, chronicling how a weight training habit pulled her out of a punishing rut. 'Psychologists who study sports behavior,' she writes, 'say that the intensity of lifting weights actually fuels a rewiring of the brain'—apparently, my mind was going to reap the benefits as well. (Working out with weights has been linked to an improved nervous system in one study and a slowdown in cognitive decline in another.) Widely different parts of the cultural conversation—from chatter on the morning shows to techy brain-science podcasts—are homing in on the benefits. I saw one amusing video where a male bystander's smirk turned to bewilderment as a woman picked up dumbbells and started shadowboxing. There are legions of viral videos of this variety. Almost three quarters of adults are trying to eat more protein—many seemingly upping their egg consumption in order to build muscle. Khloé Kardashian just released protein-dusted popcorn. (Protein supports muscle repair and growth after workouts.) And yet, like every other millennial woman whose preferred mode of exercise is Pilates and a walk through the park, I had only just begun to wonder about those intimidating objects—hand weights, dumbbells, barbells, all the bells—in the corners of the rooms where my low-impact exercise classes took place. I had long thought weight training had nothing to do with me—my goal was to become lean and flexible, not muscular and strong. And for years I had been a runner, a pastime that only felt good after I had finished, filled with endorphins and superiority. But not long ago, I gave it up, facing an awareness of my body's weak spots. Perhaps I did need to face the bells. New York is my home, but I began training in London, where I was temporarily living—it seemed I didn't have a moment to lose.
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Feminine Pursuit of Swoleness
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. You see it everywhere: A narrative of progress in two snapshots—before and after—that leaves the viewer to imagine what came in between. On the left, a body whose inhabitant is unhappy with it in some way. On the right, the same body but different, and—you're meant to understand—better. On diet culture's greatest-hits album, the 'before and after' is the lead single, an earworm that's hard to get out of your mind. Even when it's not being used explicitly to sell something (a meal regimen, a workout program), this diptych carries a promise that through the application of effort, you too can chisel yourself into a (supposedly) more appealing shape, which usually, but not always, means a smaller one. Casey Johnston's new book, A Physical Education, tells a before-and-after story, too—one not of shrinkage but of growth, physical and otherwise. Johnston traces her journey from a life of joyless distance running, which she saw as 'taking out bigger and bigger cardio loans to buy myself more calories,' to the revelation of weight lifting. Her book incorporates memoir, science writing, and cultural critique, offering a technical breakdown of the effects of Johnston's time in the gym, as well as condemnations of diet culture's scams and hucksters. The book is not a how-to, but more of a why-to: Strength training, in Johnston's telling, reframes both body and mind. Before lifting, 'I knew all the contours of treating myself like a deceitful degenerate, against whom I must maintain constant vigilance,' she writes. After lifting, 'all of the parts of myself that had been fighting each other' had become 'united in the holy cause of getting strong as hell.' Johnston has been evangelizing and explaining weight lifting online for years, first with her 'Ask a Swole Woman' online column and then with her independent newsletter, She's a Beast, along with a beginner's lifting-training guide, Liftoff: Couch to Barbell. Like any hobby, weight lifting generates plenty of online material, but much of it is aimed at an audience that already knows its way around a squat rack. Johnston stands out for her attunement to the needs and anxieties of true beginners—particularly those who are women, for whom pumping iron often requires a certain amount of unlearning. Even after the rise of body positivity, women are still frequently confronted with unsolicited promotion for crash diets, told that 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' and sold what Johnston calls 'busywork bullshit' exercises—'Target love handles with these 10 moves'; '20 minutes to tone your arms'; etc.—designed to spot-treat so-called problem areas. Social media has supercharged the delivery of these messages; though there are plenty of supportive communities online, for every body-positive influencer, there seems to be another pushing food restriction and punishing workouts. The TikTok trend of 'girl dinner' suggests that eating nothing but a plate of cheese cubes and almonds is an adorably feminine quirk rather than a repackaged eating disorder. [Read: The body-positivity movement is over] Johnston writes that since the age of 12, she'd been worrying about her weight, having internalized the message that 'either I was small enough (and always getting smaller), or I was a disappointment.' This is the message that fueled my workouts for the longest time, too—that the point of exercise was weight loss or, at the very least, staving off weight gain. Working out was a chore or—even worse—torturous penance for failing to become the impossible ever-shrinking woman. It wasn't supposed to feel good; it definitely wasn't fun. After berating myself to go to the gym in the first place, I would pedal away on the elliptical for 30 to 40 minutes until I tasted blood in the back of my throat (seems fine and normal), and then perform a grab bag of whatever calisthenics might plausibly target my core, hating every second of it. None of this changed the fact that I would get winded walking up a flight of stairs, or nearly buckle under the weight of my carry-on while hoisting it into an airplane's overhead bin. Eventually, seeking a less resentful relationship with exercise and my body, I dove into martial arts for several years, then decided to give weight lifting a try. Johnston's writing was a guide for me; I loosely followed her Liftoff program when I was getting started, and have been a regular reader of her newsletter. It turned out that picking up something heavy for a few sets of five reps, sitting down half the workout, and then going home and eating a big sloppy burger did far more to make me feel comfortable in my body than gasping my way through endless burpees and rewarding myself with a salad ever did. Johnston's assertion that lifting 'completely changed how I think and feel about the world and myself and everything' sounds like another of the fitness industry's wild overpromises. But I know what she means. I, too, have found that lifting can transform the way you relate to your body. First and foremost, Johnston explains, it inverts what women are still too-often told about the goal of exercise. It builds up instead of whittling away; it favors function over aesthetics. Weight lifting makes you better at more than just lifting weights. Johnston writes about struggling with a 40-pound bag of cat litter before she began lifting; now she simply picks it up and carries it into her apartment. As I added weight to the barbell, I felt my muscles stabilize; the neck and back pain from my butt-sitting job faded; I stopped needing help with my overstuffed suitcases; and I even started walking differently—no longer flinging my skeleton around, but smoothly engaging actual muscles. When I do cardio, running is easier too. [Read: The Protein Madness Is Just Getting Started] Here's another thing: You gotta eat. It won't work if you don't. When Johnston crunched the numbers on how many calories her body would need to build muscle, she discovered that the 1,200-calorie diet she'd been living on for years was not going to cut it. For the lifting to do anything, she'd need to eat more. Like, a lot more. Protein, especially. Going from a mindset of restriction to making sure that she was eating enough shifted how Johnston felt in her body. She had more energy; she was no longer constantly cold. She felt like 'a big, beautiful horse.' As for me, before lifting, I had never so viscerally felt the obvious truth that food is fuel, that what and how much I eat shapes what my body can do and how it feels. Yet even these discoveries cannot always overcome the influence of diet culture. When Johnston starts to allow herself more calories, at first she fears 'the worst fate that could befall a woman who bravely ate more: gaining three, or even five, pounds.' The most heartbreaking scene in the book illustrates how difficult it can be to put your weapons down after a lifetime of treating your body like the enemy. Johnston tries to spread the good word of weight lifting to her mother, whom she describes as a perpetual dieter and a practiced commentator on any fluctuations in Johnston's weight. It doesn't go well. After they take a frustrating trip to the gym together, Johnston asks, 'What is it you're so afraid of?' Her mom replies that she doesn't want to become 'one of those fat old women' whom 'no one likes.' 'I can think of lots of fat old women that many people love,' Johnston tries. 'But they wouldn't love me.' That's the well I think so many of us are still trying to climb out of: the belief that a woman's worth always lies in her desirability, that desirability takes only one shape, and that if she doesn't live up to the impossible standard, she should at least be working apologetically toward correcting that. Even if you think you've made it out, the foot soldiers of diet culture are always looking to pull you back in. I've followed some lifting-related accounts on Instagram; the algorithm seems to have interpreted that as free rein to bombard me with reels of 'weight-loss journeys,' 'bodyweight exercises for hot girlies,' and the like. Every other celebrity seems to be on Ozempic now, and apparently, 'thin is in' again. I admit I spiraled a little when I went up a size in all my clothes, even though I'd gotten bigger on purpose. [Rebecca Johns: A diet writer's regrets] Lifting culture, too, has its trapdoors back into disordered thinking. As Lauren Michele Jackson points out in her review of A Physical Education for The New Yorker, the idea that focusing on strength frees you from being preoccupied with looks is naive. Weight lifting can come with its own set of metrics and obsessions: Eating enough protein and hitting your macros can replace calorie restriction; instead of fixating on thinness, perhaps now you want a juicy ass or rippling biceps. The practice can be fraught in a different way for men, who are told that maximal swoleness is their optimal form. The same activity can be a key or a cage, depending on your point of view. But weight lifting has stuck, for me and I think for Johnston, because it can also change the way one thinks about achievement. It serves as a pretty good metaphor for a balanced approach to striving that eschews both the Lean In–girlboss hustle and its 'I don't dream of labor' anti-ambition backlash. Not running until your tank is empty and then running some more, but rather fueling yourself enough to push just a bit further than you have before. Letting the gains accumulate slowly, a little more weight at a time. And most important, learning that rest is part of the rhythm of progress. You punctuate your workouts with full days off. You do your reps, and then you just sit there for a couple of minutes. You work, and then you recover. While I'm resting, I often eat sour candies out of a fanny pack. I saw some powerlifters on Instagram eating candy before tackling a big lift—the idea being that the quick-metabolizing sugary carbs give you a little boost of energy. I don't care if this is scientifically sound. (I'm serious, don't email me.) I'm more excited to work out when I know that it's also my candy time. The gym has morphed from a torture chamber to a place of challenge, effort, rest, and pleasure, all of which, it turns out, can coexist. And failure is part of the mix, too. As Johnston writes, 'Building strength is about pressing steadily upward on one's current limits'; if you're doing it right, your attempts will sometimes exceed your ability. That's how you know you're challenging yourself enough. Sometimes failure involves gassing out on an attempt to squat heavier than you have ever squatted, and sometimes it's more like slipping on the banana peel of an old, unhealthy thought pattern. Both will knock you on your ass for a bit. But that's part of it. 'Progress could be about going backward, letting go,' Johnston writes. 'Before and after' images are only snapshots. Outside the frame, the body, and the self, keep evolving. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Feminine Pursuit of Swoleness
You see it everywhere: A narrative of progress in two snapshots—before and after—that leaves the viewer to imagine what came in between. On the left, a body whose inhabitant is unhappy with it in some way. On the right, the same body but different, and—you're meant to understand—better. On diet culture's greatest-hits album, the 'before and after' is the lead single, an earworm that's hard to get out of your mind. Even when it's not being used explicitly to sell something (a meal regimen, a workout program), this diptych carries a promise that through the application of effort, you too can chisel yourself into a (supposedly) more appealing shape, which usually, but not always, means a smaller one. Casey Johnston's new book, A Physical Education, tells a before-and-after story, too—one not of shrinkage but of growth, physical and otherwise. Johnston traces her journey from a life of joyless distance running, which she saw as 'taking out bigger and bigger cardio loans to buy myself more calories,' to the revelation of weight lifting. Her book incorporates memoir, science writing, and cultural critique, offering a technical breakdown of the effects of Johnston's time in the gym, as well as condemnations of diet culture's scams and hucksters. The book is not a how-to, but more of a why-to: Strength training, in Johnston's telling, reframes both body and mind. Before lifting, 'I knew all the contours of treating myself like a deceitful degenerate, against whom I must maintain constant vigilance,' she writes. After lifting, 'all of the parts of myself that had been fighting each other' had become 'united in the holy cause of getting strong as hell.' Johnston has been evangelizing and explaining weight lifting online for years, first with her 'Ask a Swole Woman' online column and then with her independent newsletter, She's a Beast, along with a beginner's lifting-training guide, Liftoff: Couch to Barbell. Like any hobby, weight lifting generates plenty of online material, but much of it is aimed at an audience that already knows its way around a squat rack. Johnston stands out for her attunement to the needs and anxieties of true beginners—particularly those who are women, for whom pumping iron often requires a certain amount of unlearning. Even after the rise of body positivity, women are still frequently confronted with unsolicited promotion for crash diets, told that 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' and sold what Johnston calls 'busywork bullshit' exercises—'Target love handles with these 10 moves'; '20 minutes to tone your arms'; etc.—designed to spot-treat so-called problem areas. Social media has supercharged the delivery of these messages; though there are plenty of supportive communities online, for every body-positive influencer, there seems to be another pushing food restriction and punishing workouts. The TikTok trend of 'girl dinner ' suggests that eating nothing but a plate of cheese cubes and almonds is an adorably feminine quirk rather than a repackaged eating disorder. Johnston writes that since the age of 12, she'd been worrying about her weight, having internalized the message that 'either I was small enough (and always getting smaller), or I was a disappointment.' This is the message that fueled my workouts for the longest time, too—that the point of exercise was weight loss or, at the very least, staving off weight gain. Working out was a chore or—even worse—torturous penance for failing to become the impossible ever-shrinking woman. It wasn't supposed to feel good; it definitely wasn't fun. After berating myself to go to the gym in the first place, I would pedal away on the elliptical for 30 to 40 minutes until I tasted blood in the back of my throat (seems fine and normal), and then perform a grab bag of whatever calisthenics might plausibly target my core, hating every second of it. None of this changed the fact that I would get winded walking up a flight of stairs, or nearly buckle under the weight of my carry-on while hoisting it into an airplane's overhead bin. Eventually, seeking a less resentful relationship with exercise and my body, I dove into martial arts for several years, then decided to give weight lifting a try. Johnston's writing was a guide for me; I loosely followed her Liftoff program when I was getting started, and have been a regular reader of her newsletter. It turned out that picking up something heavy for a few sets of five reps, sitting down half the workout, and then going home and eating a big sloppy burger did far more to make me feel comfortable in my body than gasping my way through endless burpees and rewarding myself with a salad ever did. Johnston's assertion that lifting 'completely changed how I think and feel about the world and myself and everything' sounds like another of the fitness industry's wild overpromises. But I know what she means. I, too, have found that lifting can transform the way you relate to your body. First and foremost, Johnston explains, it inverts what women are still too-often told about the goal of exercise. It builds up instead of whittling away; it favors function over aesthetics. Weight lifting makes you better at more than just lifting weights. Johnston writes about struggling with a 40-pound bag of cat litter before she began lifting; now she simply picks it up and carries it into her apartment. As I added weight to the barbell, I felt my muscles stabilize; the neck and back pain from my butt-sitting job faded; I stopped needing help with my overstuffed suitcases; and I even started walking differently—no longer flinging my skeleton around, but smoothly engaging actual muscles. When I do cardio, running is easier too. Here's another thing: You gotta eat. It won't work if you don't. When Johnston crunched the numbers on how many calories her body would need to build muscle, she discovered that the 1,200-calorie diet she'd been living on for years was not going to cut it. For the lifting to do anything, she'd need to eat more. Like, a lot more. Protein, especially. Going from a mindset of restriction to making sure that she was eating enough shifted how Johnston felt in her body. She had more energy; she was no longer constantly cold. She felt like 'a big, beautiful horse.' As for me, before lifting, I had never so viscerally felt the obvious truth that food is fuel, that what and how much I eat shapes what my body can do and how it feels. Yet even these discoveries cannot always overcome the influence of diet culture. When Johnston starts to allow herself more calories, at first she fears 'the worst fate that could befall a woman who bravely ate more: gaining three, or even five, pounds.' The most heartbreaking scene in the book illustrates how difficult it can be to put your weapons down after a lifetime of treating your body like the enemy. Johnston tries to spread the good word of weight lifting to her mother, whom she describes as a perpetual dieter and a practiced commentator on any fluctuations in Johnston's weight. It doesn't go well. After they take a frustrating trip to the gym together, Johnston asks, 'What is it you're so afraid of?' Her mom replies that she doesn't want to become 'one of those fat old women' whom 'no one likes.' 'I can think of lots of fat old women that many people love,' Johnston tries. 'But they wouldn't love me.' That's the well I think so many of us are still trying to climb out of: the belief that a woman's worth always lies in her desirability, that desirability takes only one shape, and that if she doesn't live up to the impossible standard, she should at least be working apologetically toward correcting that. Even if you think you've made it out, the foot soldiers of diet culture are always looking to pull you back in. I've followed some lifting-related accounts on Instagram; the algorithm seems to have interpreted that as free rein to bombard me with reels of 'weight-loss journeys,' 'bodyweight exercises for hot girlies,' and the like. Every other celebrity seems to be on Ozempic now, and apparently, ' thin is in ' again. I admit I spiraled a little when I went up a size in all my clothes, even though I'd gotten bigger on purpose. Rebecca Johns: A diet writer's regrets Lifting culture, too, has its trapdoors back into disordered thinking. As Lauren Michele Jackson points out in her review of A Physical Education for The New Yorker, the idea that focusing on strength frees you from being preoccupied with looks is naive. Weight lifting can come with its own set of metrics and obsessions: Eating enough protein and hitting your macros can replace calorie restriction; instead of fixating on thinness, perhaps now you want a juicy ass or rippling biceps. The practice can be fraught in a different way for men, who are told that maximal swoleness is their optimal form. The same activity can be a key or a cage, depending on your point of view. But weight lifting has stuck, for me and I think for Johnston, because it can also change the way one thinks about achievement. It serves as a pretty good metaphor for a balanced approach to striving that eschews both the Lean In –girlboss hustle and its ' I don't dream of labor ' anti-ambition backlash. Not running until your tank is empty and then running some more, but rather fueling yourself enough to push just a bit further than you have before. Letting the gains accumulate slowly, a little more weight at a time. And most important, learning that rest is part of the rhythm of progress. You punctuate your workouts with full days off. You do your reps, and then you just sit there for a couple of minutes. You work, and then you recover. While I'm resting, I often eat sour candies out of a fanny pack. I saw some powerlifters on Instagram eating candy before tackling a big lift—the idea being that the quick-metabolizing sugary carbs give you a little boost of energy. I don't care if this is scientifically sound. (I'm serious, don't email me.) I'm more excited to work out when I know that it's also my candy time. The gym has morphed from a torture chamber to a place of challenge, effort, rest, and pleasure, all of which, it turns out, can coexist. And failure is part of the mix, too. As Johnston writes, 'Building strength is about pressing steadily upward on one's current limits'; if you're doing it right, your attempts will sometimes exceed your ability. That's how you know you're challenging yourself enough. Sometimes failure involves gassing out on an attempt to squat heavier than you have ever squatted, and sometimes it's more like slipping on the banana peel of an old, unhealthy thought pattern. Both will knock you on your ass for a bit. But that's part of it. 'Progress could be about going backward, letting go,' Johnston writes. 'Before and after' images are only snapshots. Outside the frame, the body, and the self, keep evolving.
Vox
17-06-2025
- Health
- Vox
How America's ideal woman got jacked
is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. A lot of people are getting jacked these days, and it's not just who you would think. For men, muscles have always been a symbol of brute strength and power. In our current era, that's manifesting in their desire to get as chiseled as possible with a strict regimen of lifting and proteinmaxxing. But lately, muscles have also become something of a cultural battleground for women — at a time when beauty standards are dramatically in flux. The feminine body type of the moment shifts with time, from curvy to skinny and back again, but rarely, if ever, is America's ideal woman overtly strong. For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become 'bulky' (the horror!) but to do cardio instead, so that they would burn calories. For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become 'bulky' (the horror!). Three new books reckon with what it means for women to, at long last, begin to embrace strength. Casey Johnston's A Physical Education is a memoir exploring Johnston's journey from a thinness-obsessed runner to an empowered weight lifter. In How to Be Well, Amy Larocca explores the wellness imperative that pushes so many women today to relentlessly optimize their health. And in On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui explores the cultural symbolism of muscles and how they provide a way for us to think about who is allowed to be strong, and who we demand be weak. Strength training is, in theory, an empowering alternative to the pursuit of thinness. But what happens if all our old body neuroses from the skin-and-bone days transfers right on over to the new well-muscled ideal? How the thin woman became the well (and still thin) woman There is always a type of woman you are supposed to be, a hegemonic ideal who hovers just out of reach, impossible to ever quite achieve. While America's feminine ideals shift a little, writes Larocca in How to Be Well, these ideal women always have a few basic things in common: 'They are always very thin and they do not complain, no matter how many responsibilities are added to their list.' In the last 15 years, however, the ideal woman also became the 'well' woman, Larocca writes. This is a woman who, in addition to being thin, has relentlessly optimized her health: She is pure of microplastics and pesticides, she cold plunges and owns crystals, and her skin and body glow golden with utter, unimpregnable well-being. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The ideal American woman has not always been well. For a long time, she was just skinny. 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' said Kate Moss in the heroin-chic '90s, espousing a sentiment that would carry through to the virulently anti-fat 2000s. In that era, women exercised not in order to be well, but, explicitly and vocally, to be thin. In the 2010s, the body ideal began to shift just a little. As the Kardashians began their long cultural dominance, pop culture began to decide that it was better to have a body with curves than to be rail thin. At the same time, the success of body positive activism started to mainstream the intoxicating idea that it might be possible to like your body even if it didn't look like the body of a supermodel. Marketers began to update their language accordingly. The ideal American woman has not always been well. For a long time, she was just skinny. By the mid-2010s, the body ideal for women was more or less as follows: You still had to be thin, but maybe not quite as thin as Kate Moss. As penance, however, you were no longer allowed to talk about how thin you wanted to be. 'It sometimes feels,' remarks Larocca, 'as if a simple replace-all function has been applied to the entire beauty marketing machine: Alexa, find 'skinny' and replace all with 'strong'; find 'beauty' and replace all with 'glow.'' Wellness-as-health-as-beauty got more popular in 2016, after the first election of Donald Trump sent affluent liberals searching for things they could control in an ever-more chaotic world. In 2020, the pandemic came and brought the new paradigm to everyone. Now, wellness was a way of enacting control over one's body in a time that was demonstrating very clearly that we humans could control very little. Johnston found her way to strength training early in the transition of beauty culture to wellness culture, in 2014. In some ways, her journey mirrored the culture's larger shift in rhetoric. She admits she first got interested in weight lifting because of its aesthetic promises — it looked like a fun way to get hot that didn't involve starving and sprinting herself into a calorie deficit, as she had been doing since college. Over time, however, she began to take satisfaction in being strong for its own sake. 'I felt the differences that came from investing in strength training before I really understood them,' she writes. 'I was so used to distrusting myself, and that distrust included my body. Where did that come from?' Johnston wasn't alone. In 2024, weight-lifting was the fastest-growing sport among American women. Millions of women are trying to up their protein intake and talking about their weight-lifting journeys. At a recent work meeting I attended, four women swapped protein tips while the one man in attendance stared in confusion. 'Everyone's getting yoked,' he said. Who gets to have muscles? Part of why so many women are strength training now is all of those new scientific studies demonstrating how important it is for women. But muscles aren't just about health, in the same way that wellness isn't either. 'Strength as a proxy for worthiness, ability, or success has interesting legs,' writes Tsui in On Muscle. This has historically applied to men. Tsui cites the many rituals of ancient cultures that involve lifting heavy things to prove one's manhood or political strength. In the modern world, Tsui describes a venture capitalist who prefers to invest his money with founders who are also athletes, on the grounds that they 'understand how to push themselves past the point of pain.' If strength is a proxy for male worthiness, American culture tends to get nervous when it shows up in unexpected places. 'When we say someone is too strong or too muscular,' writes Tsui, 'it's often a comment on what we permit that person to be in society.' No woman is safe from being told that she is 'too muscular,' but some women are more likely to be targeted with that accusation than others. Dominant Black women athletes like Serena Williams and Simone Biles frequently face just such criticism, which ballet star Misty Copeland once described as 'code language for your skin is wrong.' The moral panic over trans women athletes, too, is built around the idea that trans women are too strong to be truly feminine. 'When a woman is deemed too muscular,' writes Tsui, 'it's often because her strength is perceived as taking away from someone else, or that her strength is somehow unseemly, unfair, or unnatural.' Instead, physical strength is seen as the natural property of men — specifically, conservative men. One 2023 study found that observers tend to assume that men with prominent upper body strength are right-wing. The stereotype might have emerged in part because we tend to see muscles as bodily and hence anti-intellectual, and conservatives tend to distrust intellectual elites. The binary follows a neat map of associations embedded below the level of conscious thought. Weight-lifting makes you strong, masculine, bodily, meatheaded, conservative. Cardio makes you small, feminine, intellectual, wiry, liberal. In real life, cardio and weight training both affect body shapes in strange and unpredictable ways, and they don't say anything about our political or intellectual goals. On the level of the symbol, though, the associations are strong — which is part of why it's so striking to see so many women start lifting weights. If strength among men codes as conservative, among women it codes as subversive, feminist, and a rejection of the male gaze. As weight lifting for women has become more mainstream, however, promoters have had to begin filing away at that last association. Perhaps that's part of why women's magazine articles urging women to strength train always come with an anxious assurance that, despite popular belief, weight training won't make you bulky and unfeminine. The optimization trap In A Physical Education, Johnston writes with relish about eating more to gain muscle mass. 'I had never deliberately gained weight before in my entire life,' she writes. Yet once she increases her daily calorie budget and muscle begins to pile on, she likes what she sees in the mirror: 'a god, radiant like a big, beautiful horse.' Body positivity or no, Johnston spends a surprising amount of time dwelling on how as she lifted more, her pants 'grew ever so slightly tighter in the legs and hips but fell away at the waist.' She writes extensively about how much more efficient weight lifting is at shrinking the waistline than cardio is, and she tracks cardios and macros with meticulous precision. Intuitive eating, or the process of eating what feels good to your body, she dismisses as 'circular doublespeak'; she's a woman who wants her every Cup Noodles logged and its nutritional content fully analyzed. In the bodybuilding world, food tracking is common and, at the elite level, necessary. Still, there's a tight parallel between Johnston's obsessive counting and Larocca's well woman, who follows her Oura sleep score with sleepless vigilance and wears a continuous glucose monitor to track her blood sugar even if she doesn't have diabetes. 'It feels irresponsible to be satisfied with 'fine,'' writes Larocca, and tracking biometrics promises to show a person how to optimize well beyond 'fine.' The seductive promise of going beyond fine is at the heart of the idea of the well woman. You might be basically healthy as you are, but is that really good enough? Can you really look after your children and loved ones if your health is just fine? Will you ever be beautiful enough or thin enough or pure enough at just fine? Wellness promises to get you there, in the same way that dieting promised to get you there in 1996. Of course, dieting hasn't stayed in 1996. It's currently rushing back into the mainstream with a vengeance. Fueled by the popularity of Ozempic, fat-shaming diet communities like SkinnyTok have begun to emerge, allowing users to share weight loss tips and 'tough love' instructions to one another to stop eating, much like the magazine voices that Johnston recalled internalizing as a college student driven to starve herself. Related The year of Ozempic bodies and Barbie Botox Strength training for women positions itself as a counterweight to communities like SkinnyTok. It's a world in which women are told in no uncertain terms that no matter what they do, they have to at least take in enough calories; a world that promises to make women bigger instead of smaller. Yet all the same, strength training does not seem to be quite enough to break the hold that the need to optimize has over us, in the same way that wellness culture didn't either. A well woman can still obsess over the pesticides and microplastics in her groceries. A woman who strength trains can still obsess over whether or not she is eating correctly. There is always a way to be absolutely correct, and it always seems to be drifting farther and farther away from us. Strength training does not seem to be quite enough to break the hold that the need to optimize has over us, in the same way that wellness culture didn't either. We are driven to politicize and optimize the muscles of our human bodies along with everything else. But our muscles can also offer us more than their symbology. In On Muscles, Tsui quotes the happiness scholar Dacher Keltner, who argues that many of our emotions are 'about' our muscles: 'Joy, for example, which often involves jumping,' he says. 'Or love, which is about embracing, postural movements. Emotions are about action.' This idea goes back to Charles Darwin, who observed in 1872 that for both humans and animals, 'under a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure, there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds.' We jump and laugh and clap with delight; dogs wriggle and bark and run in circles. When we come together to express joy as a community, we dance, jumping for joy all together as one. Our joy exists in and through and in relation to the movement of our muscles. That's a basic physical fact. We can't change it, no matter how much we optimize.
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.
