Weightlifting made Casey Johnston stronger — in muscle and mind

After years of following diets and running a bunch of half-marathons, journalist and editor Casey Johnston finally hit her goal weight of 138 pounds at age 26. 

But after all that, she didn't find the happiness or self-confidence she was promised. Instead, she felt deeply hopeless, running on empty.

"I realized I was hoping for this moment when everything would feel like it clicked and I would not have to be trying so hard," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "[Where] it didn't take so much effort and so much of my mental energy and physical energy in order to just be comfortable in my body."

"But I found that the longer it went on, the more kind of maintenance it seemed to take, the more the more energy and the more attention."

That's when she remembered a Reddit post about weightlifting — and decided to try it — despite everything telling her that it wouldn't get her where she wanted to go. 

Now, years later, she writes about the unexpected healing she gained from weight training in her book A Physical Education. 

She joined Roach to discuss her journey to finding joy and acceptance in her body and, at the same time, her spirit.

Mattea Roach: Where did the priority of optimizing your body come from for you, do you think? 

Casey Johnston: I tried to take a really honest inventory over the course of writing this book of how my thoughts have been shaped over and my view of myself and working out and food over the course of my life. 

I mean, there's cultural forces. There's the stuff we read in magazines. The ubiquitous presence of celebrity doctors who present themselves as having all of these quick, easy answers. There were, at the time, women's magazines that had so much to say about the best fruits for weight loss etcetera, but then there was also my own family background.

My father was an alcoholic. We all struggled with that. My mother had her own traumatic background and it really created this dynamic of, when I was a child, that I always had to be on my toes. It was very performance-oriented in a way that I felt like I had to maximize my own performance to make everything as okay, as safe as possible for myself. That's not something that kids should have to go through, but it sort of permeated outward into how I saw my place in the world, which was that my role, my job as a person was to be responsive to all of these instructions that I was getting, that I had to produce my own safety and my own place in the world through this hard work of of following all these instructions that people were giving in order for acceptance.

So you're in this spot where running, cardio, dieting is not working for you. You come across this Reddit post that clearly made an impact on you about a woman with a different approach to fitness: weightlifting. What sorts of things did she reveal to you about dieting and strength? What spoke to you in her story?

When I saw this post I was completely blown away by it because I had always been told that lifting weights will make you bulky, that if you just sort of want to lose weight, that lifting weights is sort of a bridge too far unless you want to be some mega-strength person. So I was fascinated when I came across this post. 

A lot of times when you see before and after photos, they're about the exaggerated transformation. I was used to seeing infomercials for weight loss products where people had really changed a lot. What was fascinating to me was actually that her body hadn't changed that much. It had changed in minor ways. And I liked the aesthetic changes, but I was like, I've been warned up and down how much lifting weights would do everything you didn't want. 

She was here doing all of these things that I had been told not to do and she was not only fine, but she was so happy and having a great time.- Casey Johnston

But after looking at her pictures, I was like, she's not that different. And not only that — in her description of what she was doing, she was only working out three times a week. She was only doing five reps at a time of three movements for a few sets and then she was done. So that was taking her 30 minutes. She was eating way more than I was at that time. 

She was here doing all of these things that I had been told not to do and she was not only fine, but she was so happy and having a great time. 

Was there ever a point in your lifting journey where you felt concerned that you were pushing yourself just to push yourself like you had been in previous workout routines? 

What I keep coming back to is that there are so many mechanisms that are inherently about building yourself up, about protecting yourself, and building a relationship with yourself, which really was the most important part of it to me. 

There's this just atomic unit of lifting that I hadn't experienced in any other physical activity though, you could apply it, just no one does. But it was more built into lifting. 

You would do a rep or do a set and ask yourself, 'How did that feel?' What was my experience of that? Was the weight too heavy? Was it too light? How did my forearm feel? Do I feel like I'm feeling this in the right muscles? 

I was able to understand how I was feeling about so many other things in a way that I had never done before.- Casey Johnston

And a lot of these questions you don't know the answer at first and that is okay, but you're encouraged in this practice of inquiry of yourself and experience of something and that, to me, was so significant because pursuant to my personal background and pursuant to how a lot of us, but women especially, are treated in cultures to discourage inquiry of your experience. To push down whatever it is that you're feeling because someone else's feelings are more important, because someone else has greater needs than you. And that's not to say that you are the most important person in any room, but that this is an experience of yourself that radiates outward.

The experience of asking myself how I felt and lifting encouraged me to develop that practice more outside in the world and I was able to understand how I was feeling about so many other things in a way that I had never done before. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Liv Pasquarelli.