You'd be a better person if you exercised more

(But let's define "better.")

Olympic gold medalist figure skater Alysa Liu, lost in the sauce of joyful movement and optimism. | Source

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I was the worst version of myself around 17 years ago.

In college, when I was in the depths of a binge eating disorder and a binge drinking predilection to match, I regularly blacked out, fell and hurt myself, and had sexual experiences I later wished I hadn’t. I was reckless and sloppy, the pitiable “hot mess” friend, and it’s miraculous I didn’t get into far worse trouble than I did. I was desperate to maximize any time when I wasn’t so anxious that I’d need to take to my bed, so I became rather manic: I clawed for the cheap dopamine hits of another drink, more flirtation with whoever paid me any attention, another hour up at night to keep the party going, massive plates of late-night food. My empathy for that version of myself runs deep now, but I suspect I was hard to be around sometimes. I’m sure it was easy to see that I wasn’t doing well.

Worse in some ways was that I was not careful with or considerate of the people around me. I remember too many moments of being a killjoy, a wet blanket, a brat with a bad attitude. I was edgy, paranoid, and snappy, and skilled in the art of making my problems other people’s problems, too. Maybe I hoped they’d help me shoulder the weight of them somehow, but I wasn’t asking for help in the right way. Plenty of people have occasional moments like these, and I don’t mean to rip myself apart over it, but in an effort to grow as a person I’ve had to accept that there was a time when I was deeply unhappy and didn’t care how contagious that could be.

Now, at 37, I am much better.

I stopped binge eating and drinking, and I stopped treating myself and my body like its patrons treated the toilet from Trainspotting. I’m better now in the sense that my mental and physical health have improved by leaps and bounds, and I could write a book about exactly how I lost nearly 70 pounds, reversed conditions like hypertension and prediabetes, and became strong enough to pull twice my bodyweight off the floor. I could offer you a fair bit about how to be better in those sorts of ways.

But instead, the book I wrote is more about how to make your character better — because with 17 years of distance from college Mikala and around a decade of serious strength training practice behind me, that’s the headline. A movement routine that you enjoy, that works for your life, and that does not demand perfection, will make you a better person, not just a better body. That’s what matters most to me, that’s what I think should matter most to you, and that’s why I wrote The Forever Project.

By becoming a “better” person, I don’t mean you’ll become a more optimized, productive, efficient, or impressive person. I don’t mean that exercise makes you maximally able to perform at work, in the dating world, or in your daily routines. I don’t even mean that it makes you stronger, fitter, bigger, leaner, faster, or more flexible (it can do those things, but they’re not the most important). I mean that exercise makes you think better of yourself and act better toward yourself, and in turn enables you to extend that goodwill to the people around you. I mean that exercise increases your capacity for goodness. I think we need good people more than we need people who excel at earning, hustling, and grinding away at their own agendas.

The chapters each focus on a way I’ve become a bit better — not perfect; lol, definitely not perfect, can you even imagine — across certain character or personality traits. And because I’m a reporter who tries not to trade in nonsense and fluff, I explain how this potential character development is backed available research and scientific inquiry. The Forever Project argues that exercise done well will additionally make you more: Patient, curious, caring, perceptive, resilient, emboldened, and compassionate. And in the final chapter, I write about how exercise made me, and will make you, an optimist.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had more people who are, somehow in this world, even a few percentage points more optimistic about what they can control: their interpersonal relationships, their communities, and themselves?

My husband once told me he was chatting with one of our friends who described me as an optimist. This knocked me sideways, probably because it represents a staggering degree of growth from college Mikala: a girl who believed herself undeserving of love, respect, or a contented future, and who left behind a slimy trail of anxiety and nihilism most places she went. While I started to feel sunnier about life several years ago, to know that someone else sees me that way feels significant. I hope it’s more contagious than my bummer vibes in college were. The fact that I now care at all about how other people feel is significant, too.

Here’s an excerpt from the “How exercise makes you more caring” chapter of The Forever Project:

I have family members aged anywhere from sixty-five to ninety-four who have taken nasty falls and who are struggling with a lack of functional strength. More strength exercise earlier in life wouldn’t have made them invincible or necessarily prevented any injuries, and people of those age groups weren’t privy to the same kind of “You need to be strength training” messages when they were younger that many of us are now. It’s really no surprise they’re not as into it as many people of my generation and younger are becoming. Lifting weights didn’t move into the American mainstream consciousness until the late 1970s and ’80s, when the documentary Pumping Iron introduced the world to Arnold Schwarzenegger and there was a rise of big coed gyms, according to Danielle Friedman’s New York Times article “The Decade That Changed Fitness Forever.”

Given my personal and professional history, though, I can’t help but see how more strength exercise could have given the older people in my life even the slightest bit more potential armor against some of these misfortunes. I’m disheartened that for myriad reasons then, and for many now that are often beyond their control, so many people aren’t accessing a kind of movement that could do this. I’ve been somewhat radicalized from working in gyms with older adults who do strength training and other exercise regularly (and, again, many of them have the time, money, resources, and proximity that others don’t). There is a breathtaking, staggering difference between them and the people of their age cohort who don’t. They move with more energy and less pain than some thirty-five-year-olds I know. Everyone should be able to do what these older adults do and have what they have, but American life is not set up to make this easy or affordable for many people.

Getting into strength training and seeing how it changed my life made me care so deeply about this inequity because I’m one of the ones on the better end of it, and from there I can see that I’m not in this position just because I’m a morally better person. Mostly I’m just lucky. I’m there, playing the game in Easy Mode, because I’m a logistically privileged person. That’s why I care so much about helping people understand how to tap into the benefits of strength exercise however they can, as much as they can, given the realities of their lives. I want people to experience some of what I have through getting stronger, because I’ve realized all the ways it can make life easier.

Ultimately, life started to feel easier when I became better, when I started to feel more patient, more curious, more caring, and all the rest — and all of that happened when I started seeing exercise as less a tool for sculpting my body and more for expanding my lived experience. That includes, and I hope will always include, other people.

In fitness spaces I became someone who cared about herself, so I got better at being caring. I started to understand my body in new ways, so I got better at understanding other people’s bodies. I developed compassion for myself, so I had it for others, too. (Including my mother, who was doing her best to help and guide me but who was operating within a cultural framework that had her putting me on crash diets in eighth grade. My interview with her, in which I came to understand so much of her generational and enduring body struggles and how they showed up in her parenting, is in the last chapter.)

I’ve observed a recent outcry, on Substack at least, against “self-help” books, which I agree can be very “This could have been an email” at best or “This is snake-oil horseshit” at worst. It’s unsurprising that people are disinterested in being told how to improve or optimize themselves when many of them are only trying to survive; or when that improvement or optimization is pointed only in the direction of relentless financial gain. Many self-help books trap the reader in a therapy speak-driven cycle of navel gazing; their aim is to help you ponder or journal or re-contextualize yourself into feeling more happy or peaceful or consciously elevated. I don’t necessarily take issue with those endeavors, but I understand the distaste for constant but maybe hollow self-work — perhaps at the expense of helping others, or at least consuming better art — in an ever more individualistic society. The Forever Project is almost certainly going to sit on the self-help shelf (even though it’s really half memoir, half practical guide, but whatever), so maybe you’ll write it off. Here’s why I think you shouldn’t:

I could only write this book once I got better enough to see the value — through my movement practice — of things some self-help books promise you’ll never have to feel again: Discomfort, challenge, boredom, and failure, to name a few. Those are ever-present in exercise to some degree, and they should be, and to experience and learn to tolerate them in new ways is profoundly transformative. (I wrote about some of these feelings in this post about women-only gyms).

The book is called The Forever Project because I believe that all of us will have to work to feel better in and about our bodies, and will have to frequently re-negotiate how we’ll do that, for the rest of our lives. I believe we’ll struggle in some ways, sometimes, with our relationships to our bodies forever. As we get better, though, this is less daunting. It’ll be easier to handle. We’ll have the skills and character to meet the demand.

My book isn’t about a finish line I’ve reached, a state of perfection and pure light to which I’ve ascended. I didn’t hack anything that exercise science hasn’t already figured out. I just realized that in fitness spaces I could develop transferable skills that made me a little bit better at being good to myself and other human beings, and I think more of us should try to do that so each of our own little worlds feel a little better, too.

The way I got better wasn’t to only read or think or journal my way into it — it was to go do, to act, and to experience a bit of non-threatening friction along the way that I slowly became better able to tolerate. Fitness spaces are a relatively low-stakes place to start all that. So many people have barriers to them — I also wrote for P.E. Moskowitz’s Mental Hellth newsletter about this in 2022 — but as I make plain in the book, you can cultivate a movement routine (even a 10-minute, twice a week one; a routine’s a routine) anywhere, for no money. I advocate for working with what you have, and to hell with anyone who says it’s not enough.

So while a lot of the books in my genre focus on helping you become more efficient, more effective, and better in realms that are self-contained, my hope is that this book expands the goal beyond just you. I hope you’ll see it as a means of working on yourself first so you can then show up more generously in the world. It might sound idealistic, but I’ll say it anyway: I truly believe that if legions of people felt better about and more at peace in their bodies through movement, we’d see an outpouring of compassion, care, curiosity, and other attributes I’ve written about here.

So: You should start exercising if you don’t, or you should think about it differently if you do it primarily for aesthetic or performance reasons. Then you’ll get better. Then we’ll all get better. My book will help you do that. I can’t wait for you to read it — I’m optimistic that you’ll get a lot out of it.

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