Have you dieted away your muscle?

A discussion with Casey Johnston about why many women have, and how her new book can help them get it back.

Casey Johnston and her book. Author photo by Elena Mudd.

Body Type brings a community of nearly 12,000 readers posts about how people think, talk, and act about bodies nowadays, plus guidance for feeling better in and about your own. It’s published by Mikala Jamison, a writer who’s worked in the fitness industry, been through eating disorder recovery, and loves lifting weights. She also has a book on the way. For access to all Body Type posts (check out the most popular) go paid for less than $1/week, or sign up for the freebies.

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In 2017 I sent my husband these messages:

Back when we used to talk on GChat, lol

I’ve since been a dedicated follower of Casey’s work (Ask a Swole Woman was her column in multiple publications), and if you’ve ever asked me for fitness advice, I probably sent you a bunch of Casey links. I know much of what I know because of her, and she brings a warm, approachable tone to a historically thorny subject. Casey currently writes the She’s A Beast newsletter.

I was thrilled to talk to her about her book, A Physical Education, a must-read. It simplifies how lifting works and why (for everything from getting stronger to improving your outlook on life), and will acquaint you with a kind of exercise that helps you love your body instead of punish it.

There are two great reviews out in Substack newsletters already, by

lyz

here and

Meredith Sell

here. Check those out, and read on for what Casey and I discussed about the wider context in which A Physical Education is situated (it’s a good one).

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This interview has been edited and condensed.

MJ: I underlined, highlighted, and drew a heart next to this passage in a chapter where you write about how lifting made you realize how depleted (physically, emotionally, mentally) you’d been and how strong you could become:

“I’d been neglected for so long I’d thought that idea that I could grow was a joke. I had not realized how much I’d felt like an empty shell until I looked inside and found a person in there, barely alive but still breathing.”

That’s exactly how getting into lifting made me feel, like I had no idea how disconnected from my body I was until I started strengthening it. Tell me more about what you learned about depletion and growth.

CJ: A big thrust of the book is my discovery that I had, unbeknownst to me, depleted a significant amount of my muscle, which I thought was just sort of there, waiting for me to lose enough weight to reveal it. I wasn’t realizing that you could diet it away. Your body chips away at it for nutrients util you enter a state of starvation, basically.

My experience of discovering I had depleted myself in this way, and finding out there was a way to reconnect and return to the person I was inside already, made me wonder how many other people out there might benefit from this process and cycle of rebuilding their muscle.

There’s a vested economic interest in separating you from your body and making you think that you’re a beast that needs to be tamed and deprived and subdued. There are motivated financial interests in making you feel that way. It’s not your fault. But it’s a very concrete, practical thing that can be counteracted, not through incredible effort or otherworldly talent for strength training, but by doing basic things.

Everyone would be dead on the floor if they knew how quickly you can learn basic strength training. No one understands better than me how it feels like the most arduous, impossible thing, but the way your body is able to grow and get stronger, it happens quickly.

We had a similar experience getting into strength training. You started by reading “Starting Strength,” I started by reading “Thinner, Leaner, Stronger.”¹ I wanted to study lifting; for me it felt like, “I’m buying into this in a serious way, I’m becoming a student of this.” Your book feels like an accessible text that can help people understand lifting better without having to go quite that deep.

I felt like by the time I was sitting down with “Starting Strength,” I had already put so many hours into magazine workouts, reading through those, trying to do chair dips and everything. All of that time never coalesced into anything. If someone could have just given me “Starting Strength” to begin with, it would have saved me a lot of time.

I have a sense that when it comes to cardio, it’s so much more of a lingua franca in our physical education system — even if you hate exercise you probably have a more intuitive sense of how cardio works. You understand setting a pace for yourself, how far is far, what it feels like when you’re running too hard. But at least when you and I were growing up, we didn’t educate people in the same way on lifting. There could be a much better, foundational understanding of how lifting works. If it were more integrated, I think we would not have this burden of having to sit down and learn it as adults.

Muscle is worth protecting in a way that is not and should not be super complex and privileged to only the few who can join a fancy gym and access a ton of fancy equipment or eat a super-specific, regimented diet.

It seems like you want people to understand that any exercise, especially lifting, can be folded into everyday life without having to make it one’s entire life.

Right, I’m not somebody who thinks the world would be better if everyone went to the gym for an hour a day. I don’t really think that is how things should work at all, or will work. Having this separate industry and hobby of exercise is a correction for how much we’ve come to think that exercise is this recreational thing versus something more built into our lives. I don’t think the future is that everyone becomes a hobbyist weight lifter, per se. In my socialist utopian future, we’re all out there building each other’s houses and stuff, uniting community care and physical activity, that’s my vision. But you don’t have to learn to squat 200 pounds to make a lot of our basic physical tasks much, much easier.

swolewoman

A post shared by @swolewoman

You once wrote a post about why “cutting” (eating fewer calories to lose body fat while maintaining muscle, which can lead to more strength gains later) is different from the dieting for “weight loss” you’d tried your whole life. In the book you write about how lifting added nuance to the fraught conversation about weight change. How did it help you think about that differently?

The framework of cutting is that you cannot diet more than a certain amount without putting at risk muscle that you have worked so hard for. If you diet too hard, you’re going to undo all that you’ve done. If I dieted too hard too quickly, I’d be putting my muscle at risk, and then that was going to get me in this vicious cycle of, OK, now I have less muscle, my life is worse physically, my body is doing worse without that muscle, my metabolism is lower. It’s getting progressively harder to diet without that muscle, and then it becomes this rat race. But cutting for a finite period of time, even if it takes longer, is less risky, less uncomfortable.

In the past if I dieted quickly I’d be like, OK, can we just be done with this? But then not only was it never really done, it would catch up with me in this years-long “trying to lose the last five pounds” sort of thing. But your body does not go away. I wanted to be able to diet and then forget about it for, ideally forever, but bodies don’t work that way. I’m completely sympathetic to that, I felt like I just wanted to forget about this horrible, inconvenient, meat sack of myself, right? But that came from being taught to think a certain way about my body that now I’m glad I’ve confronted. I’ve become open to a different way of existing in myself.

Speaking of, you had a baby last year. How are you working out and feeling about your body now?

I didn’t start working out again until six weeks after, just lifting with the bar. I’ve built back up, but I’m not trying to push too hard and skip back into really heavy weights. I’m doing a program called RISE that’s a bit more athletic-focused. I’ve been having fun with it. I’ve been thinking back to when I was doing so much volume of heavy lifts, and it was really working as far as my appearance, my muscles were pretty popping. But I think that kind of training for me now would feel like a chore, whereas this RISE program might not have the same impact physically, but I’m enjoying it.

I just saw a post on Reddit where a woman talks all about fitness, she’s a fitness person, and you can tell she’s in good shape by her workouts, but she’s not super muscular or super skinny. I’ve had some big muscles, but I also appreciate that post as someone who felt like they never saw examples of a sort of “whatever” body; you can work out but not look extreme. I feel like I’ve suffered for all these extremes, but now know you can be sort of fit and just having a good time, gym-wise, but not fall down the rabbit hole of trying to have two percent body fat.

If I’m honest, I’ve often wondered if in becoming a muscular and sometimes especially “fit”-looking woman, I’ve substituted one body ideal for another; I don’t care about looking “skinny” anymore, but I do like looking muscular and lean. What do you think about that?

We all live in the world, and the world is unfortunately very appearance-focused and superficial. It’s a lot to ask of anybody to transcend that entirely and just be this pure being of light who has no thoughts about how they look, right? Substituting one body ideal for another is bad if they’re equally problematic, but you have a responsibility to yourself to do your best when it comes to recognizing when something is hurting you.

I really lacked that ability and intuition, and lifting was good because it gives you this language that helps you ask those questions about yourself: How do things feel? How did that set feel? How did you feel at the gym, or when you ate a good meal versus when you didn’t? And that backed into this larger asking of questions, like how do I feel when a boyfriend is mean to me? When my boss didn’t listen to me about something at work?

Yes, the language I have now from lifting helps me ask questions about my body and values that I didn’t when I just wanted to be skinny. Even if there’s some body ideals in mind, they don’t feel harmful to me in the ways my old ideals did. The book illuminates how lifting helped you cut out the noise about what’s allegedly “right” or “wrong” regarding making body changes.

When it comes to stuff like this, the specific experience that you are having matters, because you have to be you — you are in your body, nobody else has to be you. And I think we’ve kind of robbed people of that agency, in a way. If you make a decision and it doesn’t hurt you and you’re truly at peace with it, then no one else can tell you otherwise, and if you’re coming at it from a place of self-harm and a lack of awareness, there’s only so much that other people can do for you to bring that awareness beyond expressing concern. But no one else can really tell you what you’re doing and why.

I think part of the problem overall is that we have an impoverished sense of how complex our relationships with our bodies and food and physical existence can be, but it’s such a big part of our existence. You are your body, and there’s a lot more interplay between your brain and body than previously understood.

There’s a lot of projecting that can happen with stuff like this, and it’s completely understandable because it’s so personal. But we don’t really recognize how individual these experiences can be. And we think everyone feels a certain way about their body or food because that’s our whole reality, but someone else can have a whole different reality, like … maybe they never learned to hate themselves. To me that’s like an alien from another planet, but they’re out there. I think they exist.

I’m trying to make room for not being perfect at this as well, to have an openness about it being an ongoing conversation for your whole life.

Buy A Physical Education, out May 6, here.

1. There’s a lot of “We must get women to buy this book!”-style marketing at play here (which worked on me back in 2014; different time, different me). The “thinner” in the title, the stuff about getting a “toned beach babe body.” There is good info in it, and strength training plans I followed when I first started, but I recommend other things now.