In ‘Physical Education,’ a writer chooses weightlifting over dieting

After years spent running and dieting, Casey Johnston stumbled on a Reddit post about weightlifting that transformed her relationship with her body.

She had absorbed the cultural message that the purpose of exercise was to make her as small as possible.

That’s why, while scrolling through a weightlifting message late one night, Johnston was startled by how people who lifted talked about exercise.

“I don’t lift to be hot. I lift to be strong,” Johnston recalls one devoted powerlifter posting online. She found such a claim bewildering, disingenuous even.

“Liar,” Johnston thought to herself.

But in her book — part memoir, part science journalism — Johnston makes a captivating case for why strength training can offer so much more.

She writes movingly of how learning to lift weights helped her build emotional strength after leaving an abusive relationship and a toxic job. It helped repair her disordered eating and allowed her to enjoy food.

Most importantly, it changed her attitude about her own body, from one centered on denial of pleasure to a relationship that now embraces movement, rest and eating equally.

She discovered, she writes, that “my body could feel good to be in, powerful even. My body could do things.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Why was it so hard for you to believe that the Reddit poster you write about was motivated by a desire for strength — not attractiveness?

The really short answer is just probably internalized misogyny. We can’t accept that a woman would want anything, truly, other than to be hot.

I wanted to be honest that my motivation for getting into lifting was being fixated on preserving attractiveness, hotness and losing weight. It wasn’t like, “I just want to try this thing because it seems fun.” No, the honest thing is that I had tried everything [to lose weight], and it felt like nothing else was working. So strong is the impetus to continue to try to be as hot as possible, at all costs.

How did you start to think of exercise as something you do for your health and well-being, rather than to make yourself smaller? And what did you learn about how dieting effects muscle?

I became overweight in college and wanted to quote-unquote “do something about it.” And I tried, at first, just dieting. I was like, “Great, I’m far too disinterested in exercise to bother with that.” Then that didn’t get me all the way to where I thought I should be, weightwise. So I started exercising. I started running, hoping to burn calories.

I was running more and more and eating less and less, but sort of staying in the same place. I just had the impression that I should always be losing weight. I was worried what people would think of me.

And then I learned that what had happened through all of this weight-loss pursuit was that I had dieted and exercised away all of my lean body mass. I thought my muscles were just there waiting to be uncovered if I lost enough weight. And it turned out that, actually, if you aren’t protecting your muscles actively, they can go away. Your body will consume them over time.

I was not aware of this at all, so I was upset to learn that that was the case. But then I discovered that lifting weights could run that process in reverse.

As a primary care doctor, I encourage my patients to exercise because it can help cardiovascular health, mood and mobility. But I find that when I say the word “exercise” to my patients, they often hear “weight loss.” Why do you think so many people confuse those two terms?

For a long time, there’s been tremendous pressure around thinking of those things as the same thing. The messaging is starting to change just in the last few years. But even a couple of years ago, the default mode of exercise was cardio. The directive of cardio in popular culture has always been burning calories, which is about weight loss.

We’ve only started to just disentangle them on a lot of levels. There’s more scholarship coming out about the fact that preserving lean muscle mass is so key to preserving our lifestyles and our health, to keeping us moving. Lean muscle mass is connected to metabolism; it’s connected to our brain activity. Exercise can have immediate contributions in how you feel and also your cardiovascular health.

We’re learning much more concretely that the contribution of exercise to health doesn’t come from weight loss and that weight [gain] is sort of a downstream effect of a lot of health problems.

I think a lot of times we talk about societal effects and individual experiences as if they’re the same thing. The way we feel about our bodies is related to capitalism, patriarchy and misogyny. But at an individual level, it feels dismissive to say, “Oh, you feel that way because of capitalism.” It’s not enough to help somebody truly get at the root of what is meaningful to them. Why does their appearance feel so important and threatening to their livelihood or goals?

I don’t want appearance to matter. This is my least favorite thing to spend time on. I just feel an obligation to talk about it rather than sweep things under the rug. I bring a lot of personal experience to it. I was obsessed with dieting because of my personal background. It doesn’t need to mean that everyone else comes from the same place.

I think your individual experience of your body matters. If you want to understand more about how you feel, it’s not on the outside, but it’s on the inside too.

You write about how intimidating gym culture can be, especially when you started lifting in 2014. Have things changed at all? 

I think for a long time it’s been this really sort of macho, alpha bro-coded thing. It still was when I started lifting. There was not a lot of content around it that was accessible to people. If you wanted to learn to lift, pre-smartphone, you had to get a very dense textbook.

It has percolated out into the culture. Lots of people lift weights now. They have more awareness that it doesn’t need to be this intense personality that you take on in order to do it. It can be the same relationship a lot of people have with running, where it’s like, “Oh, I’m not a professional runner. I’m not running marathons. I’m just doing it because I enjoy certain aspects of it.”

I love that approach. I am a very casual jogger, which I do because it makes me feel good and it helps me sleep, but I don’t really have a “runner identity.” Can starting lifting be that easy too?

You don’t have to take on the overwhelming thing of, “Oh boy, I’m going to be completely different if I lift.” It can be super-incremental. Start small. Let the natural feedback loop start. Your body is good at building muscle. If you give it a chance, with these basic elements, I found it can be transformative. … That work of looking closer and listening to yourself is so worth the time.

You write beautifully about how good you feel when you start lifting. Why does strength training feel so empowering for you, when dieting and cardio didn’t? 

It’s not just about being smaller. It’s about how you feel. It’s about protecting yourself. You deserve some fundamental functionality of your body and good feelings of being in your body. Because you have to be in your body.

For me it was always just like, “Oh, your body, it sucks and it’s annoying.” It’s terrible that you have to deal with it. It’s awful to work out, and you should just always be minimizing and hating every part of this.

Lifting brought in this angle of A) you don’t have to hate it and B) it can be a positive contribution and good feeling. And not just in a way where you feel virtuous because you’re deprived in this problematic way.

There’s something to acknowledging how central our bodies are. We all deserve to give them time and attention. We’re really encouraged from a lot of angles to separate, disconnect, push them aside in all of these ways, rather than pay attention to how we feel. How does it feel to be in your body?