Before Casey Johnston started weightlifting, she had assumed it was the preserve of \u201cpeople who already had some sort of talent or need for it \u2013 like you\u2019re a football player, a firefighter or in the military, and you need to be physically capable in that specific way\u201d. Getting started seemed intimidating: the technique, the gym environment.<\/p>\n
Cardio, however, had always felt intuitive. \u201cYou go out the door and you run until you can\u2019t run any more, and that\u2019s it,\u201d 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 \u201cundid\u201d her hard work \u2013 never mind how cold her extremities and faint her head.<\/p>\n
After years on the exertion\/deprivation treadmill, Johnston felt like a failure: \u201cLike I\u2019m doing this wrong, or my body is especially difficult to wrangle.\u201d But as a science fiend and engineering graduate, something had started to smell off about the eternal glittering promise of diet and exercise. \u201cIf dieting works, where\u2019s the evidence? That was a bit of a watershed moment for me. We\u2019re all so used to taking out a lot of guilt [on ourselves] like, I\u2019m not doing it right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, in 2014, Johnston came across a Reddit post by a woman sharing how weightlifting had changed her life: that she felt strong \u2013 despite \u201conly\u201d doing five reps each of a few movements per gym session \u2013 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. \u201cI really did feel different very quickly,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Working out didn\u2019t have to be this horrible chore<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Johnston, who\u2019s 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<\/a>. When Johnston started writing a column in 2016, for a now defunct website called the Hairpin<\/a>, she was the font of good sense I needed, not just about technique, but also the importance of eating \u201clike a big beautiful horse\u201d, 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\u2019ve never looked back.)<\/p>\n
Like many women who grew up in the 2000s, I\u2019d 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\u2019s columns became a twice-weekly email newsletter, She\u2019s 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: \u201cHandling all these weights had taught me to know when I was handling too much,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI developed this compulsion to tell everyone about this thing I had found that changed so fast how I saw myself,\u201d she says. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnston grew up in upstate New York, and studied at Columbia University. She graduated in 2010, into the recession. She couldn\u2019t get an engineering job and wound up in the media, writing about technology. Her affinity with \u201cknowing how everything actually works\u201d prompted her to investigate the mechanics behind the muscle. \u201cThere is so much beautiful science here that is not leveraged at all,\u201d she says. \u201cI felt like everything I\u2019d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most immediate discovery was that the cravings Johnston had always thought were normal \u2013 and normal to suppress \u2013 disappeared once she started eating 50% more to fuel her workouts and recovery. \u201cI could spend an entire day thinking: I want cookies, or I can\u2019t have cookies. When can I have cookies? How will I acquire them? Which cookies will I get?\u201d she says. \u201cI 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\u2019s putting you on death\u2019s door. There\u2019s this middle ground where you\u2019re substantially mentally and emotionally affected \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Casey Johnston: \u2018I really did feel different very quickly.\u2019 Photograph: Courtesy of Casey Johnston<\/p>\n
Johnston\u2019s 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 \u201cstaunch exerciser\u201d and \u201cdedicated dieter\u201d. She is resistant, especially to eating more than her minuscule calorific intake: \u201cNo one likes fat old women.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnston tells her there are plenty of fat old women that people love. Her mum replies: \u201cBut they wouldn\u2019t love me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even in the face of hard evidence to the contrary, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen 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\u2019t care what anyone said I should or shouldn\u2019t do,\u201d she says. \u201cAs a woman, I felt that people judged my appearance before anything else, and I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t manage your appearance. All we can do is help people understand they are worth caring for, which I didn\u2019t understand about myself for a long time. I had no foundation other than suffering in this way, because that was my mom\u2019s relationship to herself. It\u2019s not a moral failing to struggle with this stuff, because so many of us do.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a culture that remains fixated on women\u2019s bodies, it\u2019s 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? \u201cIf you look back through history, our aesthetic ideals have oscillated a lot,\u201d says Johnston. \u201cAnd a lot of times, tellingly, things switch up as soon as everyone gets comfortable or has stuff figured out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The democratisation of strength training via Instagram and YouTube showed Johnston how happy thousands of people were eschewing thinness as an ideal: \u201cThey just didn\u2019t, and still don\u2019t, get the same visibility as the people who sow shame and guilt.\u201d And she\u2019s sceptical about appetite-suppressing drugs. \u201cWe have yet to see any pharmaceutical or medical \u2018weight-loss\u2019 method reliably bear out as effective, sustainable and lasting. I will be surprised if GLP-1s are the exception.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cLifting was constructive for me because of the atomic unit of it,\u201d says Johnston. \u201cYou\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Writing the book allowed Johnston to examine why it\u2019s so easy to lose body awareness to external forces. \u201cThe stew of our upbringings and cultural messaging can be very overwhelming, and the feedback loops between them are very difficult to see and challenge,\u201d she says. \u201cIt 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\u2019t be working to destroy it if it weren\u2019t an immensely powerful thing to have. If there is anything that animates me, it\u2019s defiance, so the idea that I\u2019m taking something that many forces don\u2019t want me to have only inspires me to fight harder.\u201d<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t need everyone to be doing the same thing for you to be doing what\u2019s right for you<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Johnston\u2019s newsletter readers witnessed her defiance recently when she wrote about weightlifting through her first pregnancy, something women have historically been \u2013 incorrectly \u2013 uniformly <\/strong>advised against. \u201cAs 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,\u201d she wrote at the outset. Her son is now five months old. \u201cI heard from readers on both ends of the spectrum,\u201d she says. \u201c\u2018Good for you that you\u2019re lifting\u2019, and others who are like, \u2018You\u2019re actively killing your baby.\u2019 I was excited to write about it and assert my experience, for people to know that I\u2019m not speaking to this in an abstract way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnston\u2019s work feels to me of a piece with Miranda July\u2019s All Fours<\/a> (her protagonist also takes up weightlifting) and Lucy Jones\u2019s radical book on pregnancy and motherhood, Matrescence<\/a> \u2013 startling prompts that have allowed many women to escape traditional gender scripts. At the same time, particularly in the US, there\u2019s growing traditionalism around gender and aesthetic norms. It\u2019s a striking schism. Johnston makes sense of it by not trying to make sense of it.<\/p>\n
Johnston with her dog. Photograph: Jessica Pons\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t need everyone to be doing the same thing for you to be doing what\u2019s right for you,\u201d she says firmly. \u201cSo many people suffer for wanting coherence from these disparate groups who are never going to want the same things, but we\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnston\u2019s regard is powerful, and radiates outward. In A Physical Education, she writes about the importance of rest and that limits aren\u2019t \u201csomething to be ashamed of\u201d: her evangelism convinced me that I was still wildly overexercising \u2013 often 10 times a week \u2013 and prompted me to seriously pare back. She never does sponsored content and barely does social media \u2013 practically terminal for \u201cbuilding a brand\u201d. After decades of having my brain scrambled by body positivity, Kayla Itsines and protein mania, Johnston\u2019s work feels reassuringly steady, sound \u2013 and on your side.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of opportunities to pivot into courting virality,\u201d she says. \u201cBut 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\u2019m saying. I think my sheer stubbornness has won people over.\u201d<\/p>\n
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