From Peloton to powerlifting: The Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull on exercise (and more)

"I want it to be an opportunity for me to do more things, not fewer things."

Amanda Mull | Photo from The Atlantic

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Amanda Mull is a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers health and consumerism and has written a lot about exercise and the fitness industry. We talked on Twitter back in 2019 as she was writing her piece on the tribe of Peloton. I asked her to chat about how her thoughts on exercise have changed since then and what she thinks about exercise culture, body positivity, and weight loss drugs.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

MJ: Back when we talked in 2019, you said that you hated going into fitness spaces and that you despised fitness culture. Peloton changed how you felt. You wrote:

I was so prepared to hate the whole enterprise, to be immune to its positivity and to be judged by its adherents, that I hadn’t considered what might happen if it actually addressed the obstacles of time and inertia and shame that have kept me from embarking on any kind of exercise regimen. I suddenly didn’t see what was so bad about wanting to believe.

You used Peloton throughout the earlier days of COVID. What’s happened since?

AM: I really enjoyed it. I used it daily and more consistently than I had ever committed to any type of exercise regime. By the time it was safer to go outside, my fixation on it had ended. I feel like I had sort of maxed out on what I wanted to do with the Peloton. I just wanted to try a completely different modality of exercise. So I looked into finding a trainer who would teach me how to exercise and not like, put me on a diet or try to sell me a nutrition plan or sell me supplements. I found one eventually (at Form Fitness in Brooklyn) and learned all of the stuff that you can do with all kinds of different strength training. I still think that Peloton puts out really good programming. I just don’t think it was what I needed other than in a particular period of my life or period of time or set of circumstances.

People sometimes seem to think that if they start a certain type of exercise, it’s forever. I think it’s cool to say, “That was the type of exercise I wanted to do in this season of my life,” and then if it’s not the thing for you anymore, it’s not the thing for you anymore.

Especially in the last couple years I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I want exercise to be in my life. And ultimately what I came to is that I want it to be an opportunity for me to do more things, not fewer things. Because what am I gaining the skills for if it’s not to open things up for me? Like, I’m not much of a hiker. But the concept of getting stronger and better conditioned and improving my balance and improving my you know, ability to handle elevation and things like that is like a real opportunity for me to literally see more parts of the world and do more activities that would have been unpleasant or too difficult or dangerous for me before.

Your work follows what Americans spend their time and money on. Where do you think we’re at with that when it comes to exercise?

I’ve been pleased to see that strength training is having a real resurgence, people are interested in strength for strength’s sake, and that a wider variety of people are interested in that, perhaps. If [lifting] had never been opened up as something “trendy,” I’m not sure I would have found it myself. Trendiness has upsides and downsides, but I think a real upside is when it moves into a new area and makes a concept or a thing or an activity more easily culturally acceptable to a new group of people. That can be a nice thing about a workout becoming trendy. The aftermath of trendiness is normalization.

We also talked in 2019 about the idea of certain workouts — or just exercise in general — being “culty.” What do you think about that idea now?

At the extreme end anything can become culty, especially when you’re supposed to look at something as having some level of “salvation” to it, and some people look at exercise like that. But a large group of people enjoying something and believing that it’s good for them — I think it’s a little too easy to call it culty. What culty implies is an inherent irrationality to the behavior. I think that it’s perfectly rational if a bunch of your friends have tried something new and liked it and you are interested in trying it. Humans are pack animals, we live in societies, we want a sense of belonging and participation and acceptance. That happens professionally, that happens in social circles. Why wouldn’t that happen in exercise?

Since exercise and body stuff can be so loaded with baggage, it’s easy to look at people who are into it and denigrate that. Maybe there’s some saltiness about people who love to exercise. Certainly I used to feel that way!

I think there is a sense that exercise or fitness is an act of vanity. I think for some people it’s an act of vanity and if that works for you, then fine. Exercise is something we’re all supposed to do but we’re not supposed to make it too obvious. It’s the same thing as wearing makeup or getting your hair dyed or whatever. You’re supposed to do it, it’s something that’s required of you in order to adhere to societal expectations and beauty standards, but you’re supposed to hide the work. When people are not willing or able to hide the work, there is social punishment for that.

Not only are we supposed to do all the things we’re supposed to do, we’re supposed to have the perfect motivation and reasoning for them. A lot of the motivations and reasoning that society demands we have, we’re not allowed to admit to. You’re not allowed to be trying to lose weight or be thinner, even if that’s transparently what you’re doing. That’s fine, I do not personally begrudge anybody their desire to change the look or shape of their body. That’s not my business. 

Right, there’s a conversation around whether it’s “good or bad” to want to change your body, or what your body looks like, or lose weight.

I think there is this idea that if we all behave perfectly and if our motivations are to perfect our behavior, to do the maximally healthy things, the maximally healthy eating and working out, if we do all that, then we can become thin without having that as the central, explicit goal. That sort of allows people to talk around their motivations and desires and the pressure they feel, or the pressure they put on other people. I think that allows this conversation to swerve around the obvious thing sitting at the center of it. I don’t think that’s super helpful. I think it would be easier if people just said they felt like they needed to be thin or they were supposed to be thin, instead of using health as a euphemism. 

I have a hard time blaming people for that feeling, considering how many of us are told for decades of our lives that we’re supposed to want to be thin.

I have a hard time blaming people for that stuff too. There are still profound social and societal, and oftentimes professional, rewards for being thinner than you used to be. No matter what your previous weight was, there are lots of rewards and incentives to try to lose weight. A lot of times, people are just doing their best to figure out what any of that means to them and what their desires mean to them. I have a hard time begrudging anybody what they do with that set of information and incentives and experiences. I don’t blame anybody for wanting to lose weight, even if it’s not for health reasons. People feel they’re required to say, “Well I wanted to lose weight, but it was for XYZ health reason.” I don’t know how you can live in American culture and want to lose weight only for health reasons.

Sometimes I feel there’s a new cultural attitude that if you haven’t risen completely above all the influences of diet culture, you’re … I don’t know, an idiot? I don’t think so. I think you’re just a product of a screwed-up culture and you have to figure out what to do with that. I think you have to talk about it with other people.

It is the work of a lifetime to sort through. I think that curtailing the conversations that people are allowed to have about that is probably not as useful as we hoped it would be. I think it’s valuable to have some discretion about this stuff, but in conversations with trusted friends, I think people need an opportunity to figure this stuff out conversationally with others and figure out how other people feel about it.  Otherwise it’s an isolating, lonely experience. You’re trying to figure out something within yourself that is about so much outside of yourself.

Right. I don’t think we can tell people, “Body positivity exists now, so just figure it out on your own!”

Something you learn when as you get older is that your body is going to betray you in a lot of ways, and it’s going to be hard to stay positive about that. And your negative feelings about your body may be completely rational. I think the older that you get, and the more experiences you have with your body, sometimes in conflict with your body, the more overly simplistic it is to hear that you're just supposed to love it. 

I wrote something about this: “Body positivity is a scam.” It’s one of the pieces of writing I’m still most proud of. I think in it, my anger at this sort of regime change in polite conversation comes out because it is so limiting. It does presuppose a particular type of relationship that you should be able to have with your body that I think is not a reality for some people, which is completely rational. Especially because your relationship with your body is not just an internal mental process. Your body lives in the world with a lot of other things reacting to it and things it has to deal with, and of course your relationship with your physical form is going to be influenced by those things.

The capability that marketing has to turn body positivity into an individualistic pursuit is this slight of hand that marketing is really good at. [Marketing says] that it’s a thing you can do yourself if you take the right things and buy the right products and exist the correct way. I think in that way it’s no less limiting than the idea that you should think the correct things and do the correct things and buy the correct products and be skinny.  

Exactly. I’ve also read pieces that essentially argue that because the new weight loss drugs exist, body positivity is “over.” Do we really think this concept is so easily destabilized, that we had it in the mainstream for what, like three years, and now it’s over?

The conversation around these drugs is very interesting to me because it presupposes that if there’s something out there that can make you skinny, of course you’re going to be dissatisfied with anything but a skinny body. I just don’t think that’s true. I think anybody’s individual, personal relationship with their body is constantly being acted upon by outside forces that are trying to pull them in a bunch of different directions. The availability of medial interventions for people who need them is not something that needs to bring all of that crashing to the ground.

Your relationship to your body, although lots of external forces act upon it, it is an understanding of where you fit in the world. I don’t think that weight loss drugs are going to themselves change so much about the calculus of what it’s like to be a fat person in America that the concept of body positivity can no longer exist. There was already a lot working against you, why is this the straw that breaks the camel’s back?

I’ve gone back and forth on my feelings about these drugs. I have talked to some doctors about their utility for binge eating disorder and their utility for various other substance use disorders, and it’s hard for me not to be interested at least. Maybe not optimistic, but at least interested about their use in those cases. It’s interesting to me that these drugs get written about as something purely to make you skinny. That tends to show a real lack of familiarity and imagination about what all of the other possibilities look like between where a person might be now and them being 120 pounds.

I think the celebrities who use them, people who are already not fat but who want to lose 15 pounds, stir up a lot of anger about them and we forget about the “real people” who might use them.

We have a hard time looking away from celebrities when we’re trying to figure out new cultural phenomena. Celebrity culture is the ground on which a lot of these cultural battles get waged. I think in this case you have to look at this a a potential utility as a medical intervention for a  lot of other issues, rather than just “This person wants to lose 20 pounds to be at their high school prom weight.”

There are a lot of people who are impacted physically by the size or shape of their body. There are a lot of things in life that get blamed on weight and there’s not a lot of good evidence that weight causes it, but if there’s a situation where somebody has worked on their strength, mobility, and cardio capacity and they still have joint pain and whatever else that might be helped by losing a fraction of their weight, are they not supposed to try this new thing that might help them lead a more pain free active life?

Right. So when it comes to your feelings about your body now, what factors brought you to a place where you feel better than you used to?

Getting good at lifting weights has been super valuable. Finding a opportunity for capability and mastery and agency in my body that is not about the size of my body has been super super useful. Strength training can be so useful in reframing what their body is for and what it can do, in a way that cardio never did for me — it does for some people, but for me strength training was that thing. It helps me understand my body as something as a fundamentally capable machine, not something I’m constantly at war with. My body and I are hopefully working together towards goals.

And, I think understanding the fundamental limitations of my body, just genetically. I am never going to be a small-framed person, I am never going to be a light-framed person. Ballet was never in the cards for me. My body is good at some things and not others, and that’s OK. But finding something that my body is good at and that I feel good doing was just really useful. It really, really changed my feelings about my corporeal form. Strength training’s focus on not being as small as possible was the mental opening I needed to find genuine enjoyment in exercise. 

[Amanda also shared that she’s been training her back squat, bench press, and deadlift for a “max out day” at her gym in December. Wish her luck!]