How Lifting Weights Helped One Woman Drop Diet Culture for Good 

What happens when a woman trades calorie counting and cardio for barbells and unapologetic gains? In A Physical Education, author Casey Johnston unpacks how weightlifting became the unlikely path back to her body—and herself. With equal parts wit and rigor, Johnston traces her evolution from someone beholden to diet culture to someone who fuels, lifts, and lives on her own terms. Her personal transformation becomes a searing critique of wellness myths and a testament to the power of slow, steady change. Through the clang of weight plates and quiet revelations, Johnston helps to redefine what it means to be strong. Read an excerpt here:

A Physical Education

People had long freely commented on my body, almost never with invitation—even friends complimented me when I showed up to a hang- out looking noticeably thinner. But true to the promises, no one seemed to experience even a shadow of concern that I was lifting weights, because they couldn’t even remotely tell. So long as I didn’t give anything away with a sudden feat of strength—tearing a phone book in half or picking up one end of a car—my new hobby was essentially a secret.

The rate at which people can gain muscle varies a little, depending on genetics and whether they are using performance-enhancing drugs like steroids. But assuming they are training consistently, eating well, and resting enough, the average woman is able to gain about a pound of muscle per month (if they are doing recomposition, they’d also then be losing a pound of fat a month). For men, the rate is about double—two pounds per month. This is only when they are untrained, and eventually the results taper off. After six months to a year, it becomes much harder to deliberately put on muscle. (Another point against the bulk fearmongers.)

But most of the transformation that was taking place in the early days was happening in my central nervous system. My body parts and the nerves that controlled them, formerly quiet and dark, began to fizz with electricity. At first it was just a few errant sparks, misfires of a long-dormant network. But every time I attempted to do a squat or a deadlift, I was swinging up the big handle on the breaker box of the haunted old theater that was my body. And when I did, the circuits flickered a little more brightly each time. The frayed wires started to heal, and the power started to flow a little more smoothly. New lights lit up, lights I didn’t even know I had. The dark theater became a dim theater became an illuminated high school football field became a stadium concert tour’s worth of lights. The pieces of me that barely worked previously, only dimly aware of one another, were learning to blaze brightly together. My shoulders lock, my back sets, my hips tense, and my feet drive the floor away, flooded with light.

As I returned to the gym again and again, my body a little more awake each time, I began to understand what was meant by trying to assess how each rep and each set and each movement “felt.” With every new session, as I concentrated on the limbs and parts moving the weight, willing them to move, I could feel them speaking back to me. As the weights got heavier in my rows, the backs of my shoulders would ache with activity. Squats from which I could only get out of the bottom thanks to bouncing off the backs of my calves found new tension building in my hips. I started to develop a new wordless, physical vocabulary for all the new sensations and experiences I was having, cataloguing them like exotic birds in a jungle—too heavy and too light, but also the good versus better positioning of this limb to that one or relative to my torso, feet planted here versus there, weight held close versus too far away from myself.

I found that the mind-muscle connection, or the imagined dialogue sounding back from my muscles to my brain, wasn’t just my imagination. Research from the last few years suggests that active muscle cells can send signals back to the brain, through the blood-brain barrier—in the form of proteins, in fact—that indicate they are working and may induce the creation of new neurons and new memories.

I wasn’t even sure if I should tell anyone I was lifting, except that I was bursting with elation about the difference it had made in my life. I was eating and I was working out and I was resting, and all of these health-related tasks had made a near-immediate transition for me, from pits of despair to mountains of delight. Previously, all of my physical life had revolved around the dynamic of working and punishing myself for eventual rewards. But the way I went about it kept me doing more and more and more work for a reward that never came, only more punishment in its place. In lifting, the dynamic was reward, reward, reward: eat and rest to gear up for a gym session, have an amazing gym session because I ate and rested, go home to eat and rest to maximize the gym session, repeat and repeat and repeat.

I had gone so long without knowing about any of this stuff—and based on the way I heard virtually everyone talk about their bodies, based on the way so many people I knew longingly but guiltily turned down food or begrudgingly paid lip service to the idea of working out, other people didn’t seem to know, either. Neither did I know that they would care, though. The thoughts that wanted to tumble out of my mouth bordered on religious zealotry: You can lift more than you think—it’s not even that many reps or sets. Then you go home and eat your macros—you know, like protein, carbs, and fat—and even if you can’t hit depth in your squat, you can practice your form so there is no tipping or butt wink.

Squatting had become my favorite of the lifts. It helped that Richie’s squat racks came with built-in safety arms to catch the barbell, so I didn’t have to worry about getting crushed by the bar in the unlikely event I suddenly collapsed. But I practiced my squat religiously, sinking down and camping out in the bottom to stretch my hips and calves and force my knees out over my toes. I was enamored of the idea of having a perfectly structural, solid squat. And every time I showed up to the gym, I was able to pick up more and more weight.

Despite the occasional struggles, I was possessed with how elementally different I felt. Physical acts that used to be, for me, some precarious form of lurching, like leaning sideways out of a chair to grab something without getting up, became suddenly effortless.

Near the end of my previous relationship, the doomed boyfriend had given me an orchid plant. When I finally accepted how bad the relationship was, I projected many of my bad feelings onto the orchid. I stopped watering it; I didn’t put it anywhere it’d get light. Eventually, it dropped its flowers and became nothing but a couple of dull, dark-green leaves flopped over the surface of a tight, dry cube of moss and soil. As I grew, the orchid withered. This went on for about five months.

One day, I decided to try watering it and moved it closer to the window. After a few weeks, to my surprise, a tiny green nub appeared from deep inside the withered leaves, then another. New leaves sprouted. And when the weather turned brisk, the cold made the plant send a flowering spike snaking up into the air, and it popped open half a dozen new blossoms. It went on to bloom many, many times again.

In physics, there is a concept called quantum superposition. Textbooks explain it using the idea of a cat and a poison vial enclosed together in a box, unobservable At some undeterminable time, the poison vial will break, and the cat will die. So if at any time you ask me, “Is the cat alive or dead?” the answer is that I don’t know; the cat is in a superposition of “alive” and “dead.” When you open the box and look at the cat, you “collapse” the superposition, because now you know. I’d thought the orchid was dead, when in fact, it was in a superposition. I’d thought that I was alive, and in fact, I was in a superposition. I hadn’t known because I was too afraid to look. I’d been neglected for so long I’d thought the 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.

From the book A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting by Casey Johnston. Copyright © 2025 by Casey Johnston. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.