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?
Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.
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.
(Grand Central Publishing) (Elena Mudd)
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.
TAKEAWAYS
from “A Physical Education”
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.
(Maggie Chiang / For The Times)
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?
