I wish I could say that I started lifting weights because I wanted to be strong. I wish I could say that I had attained ultimate enlightenment and detachment from my corporeal form, that weight and size were nothing more than numbers. I wish I could say that not only was I not afraid of being bulky, but I accepted it and wanted it; that I wanted to enter the room shoulders and biceps first because I only enter the room from the side. In truth, I just wanted abs. I wanted to be a size small. I also wanted all of this to be easy, and every other workout I tried just got infinitely harder.
Intensity intervals had failed me. The seven minute workout was too hard and not hard enough. I didn’t want to do any more pilates, barre, or yoga. Every form of exercise I tried promised me happiness, control, and freedom from having to think so much about my body and how I was going to control its weight and size. I discovered that this was not only a lie, it was the opposite of the truth: the more I did, the more I worried about not doing enough, and the less effect any workout seemed to have. Other than trying harder, I didn’t know what options I had.
I was a runner for about seven years in the hope that one day I would be able to run long enough for my abs and self-confidence to emerge. I went from running a couple of minutes at a time until I was out of breath and had to walk to run for 15 minutes at a time, then three miles, then five, then half marathons. I ate my silly little low calorie diet. I memorized the calorie count for certain foods (a banana, a slice of toast, a half cup of carrots) until I could recite them like the alphabet. I avoided pasta, cookies, and sweets until I had to spend all my waking hours thinking about not eating them, so intense were my cravings. I watched the pounds drop, quickly at first, and felt like a magician. Then they began to go down slowly and even more slowly. I was cold all the time. Even a space heater pointed directly at my feet couldn’t keep my toes warm. I couldn’t afford a second heater for my fingers. I didn’t even remotely consider giving up; For me, failure can only be the result of not trying hard enough. A doctor never expressed his concern for me, my concern about body fat, my low blood pressure, or my apparent clinical need to wear a scarf at all times.
I kept digging the hole thinking it would eventually unlock both “balance” and trust. But I had finally outgrown my body’s biological capacity to do more. I never got to a place where I reveled in constantly pushing myself through sweaty workouts and eating raw vegetables. Instead, I was left with only the meager set of “good” foods I was allowed to eat and miles of cardio that kept unraveling forever, like a clown pulling silk scarves out of his mouth.
It took me a few years and a lot of muscle learning to understand what had really happened to me, but I’ll try to explain: I always thought that if I dieted hard and long enough, my body fat would melt away. to reveal my muscles underneath. What I didn’t realize was that dieting too aggressively for too long would also wear down my muscles. This left me not only looking for muscles that were getting harder and harder to find, but it also undermined me biologically. My muscle was what kept my metabolism high, so the less I had from the diet, the less effective each diet was. My muscles also allowed my body to basically function: move and feel good. I couldn’t see that my muscles were being affected, which was perhaps the most insidious part of the diet industry’s weight loss promises; that vicious cycle would have kept me in the rut of restricting calories forever.
One day in 2014, when I was still looking for new ways to control my body, I came across an old viral Reddit post detailing a woman’s “six months of weightlifting progress.” I had an abiding curiosity about what any activity could do to a woman’s body, and I had always heard “lifting weights makes you bulky”. But if anything, the photos of her showed her to be smaller, with a lifted butt, slightly more visible abs, and more toned arms. Witchcraft? Magic? A special two-pound dumbbell? A new kind of crunch or plank? No, just three heavy lifting movements a day: squats or deadlifts, presses or bench presses, dips or pull-ups, three sessions per week. She was eating all she could. “No cardio,” she clarified herself over and over in her comments. “You’re Hot!” other redditors commented. “Thanks, but this is mostly about how I feel,” she responded, a potentially true statement though contradictory to the before and after.
I ran my own stats through an “energy expenditure calculator” I found on the sub-Reddit, which produced a figure for how much food I’d need to do a strengthening program. I was surprised with the results. It was 50 percent more than I had been eating for most of my adult life. None of that calculated for my low-calorie, high-cardio brain. But I had gotten stuck in a cycle of eating less food and exercising more just to keep my weight where it was; the only thing left to try was to turn everything upside down.
While I originally wanted to set cardio and diet concepts ablaze and never look back, my icicle fingers got clammy at the thought of giving it all up. I got even more nervous when, after my first workout of squats, deadlifts, and overhead presses, I didn’t even break a sweat. I stood in the doorway of the gym, feeling disenfranchised to leave without some show of effort: a crumb of exhaustion, a tickle of muscle cramps. But within 45 minutes, a hunger arose in me that I had never felt before, I went to the cellar and pulled a bunch of food from the shelves: a protein shake, a chocolate bar, a vitamin water (with sugar, thanks), Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, plus a bacon, egg, and cheese bun for good measure, and I sat up in bed and ate them all.
I was very afraid to stop “burning calories” for fear that all the weight I had struggled to lose would quickly come back. But one of the core principles of lifting was that I needed to reserve my energy and not overextend myself; I stopped running until I was forced to do a five-minute warm-up around the block before my 30-minute lifts. I waited on edge during my off days when my muscles were supposedly repairing themselves with my calories and protein, haunted by visions of pounds piling on. I told myself I’d give it a month, that even in a month I couldn’t gain more than a few pounds.
And then… nothing happened. Nothing happened except that I got stronger. As instructed, I added a few pounds of weight to each lift in each session, ate my food, and rested. The little muscle he had had and accidentally destroyed on the diet was rising from his messy grave. The cold no longer gripped me. I ran hot, even. And getting around had gotten easier: bending over, carrying groceries, moving boxes in the storage basement below my apartment. And I loved lifting heavy things. I loved doing just five reps at a time. I loved sitting on my butt for a full minute between sets, gawking at the gym, “getting ready for the next set,” feeling like I was getting away with it. To the casual observer, absolutely nothing had changed, but I had never felt better in my life. I didn’t know I could feel so different.
Two years passed and I could no longer get stronger just by eating enough to maintain my weight and expect to add pounds to my lifts with each session. To keep going, he would have to eat more deliberately and gain weight to keep building muscle. I considered my options; so far, the force process had not fooled me. I achieved a caloric surplus, ate the equivalent of an extra box of Annie’s mac and cheese a day, and a new program that added more reps, sets, and movement types to grow my muscles. My weights at the gym skyrocketed, and my workouts that had become frustratingly difficult became wonderfully easy again. I gained ten more pounds and felt like a god, both in terms of strength as I have literally never felt more confident, prouder or more at ease in the body I lived in.
I look back at the pictures of myself before I get up, and sunken eyes and protruding bones jump out at me where before I only saw a body that still, even then, seemed too big. I know that person would think I’m fat now, and I don’t even need them to know they’re wrong, partly because they wouldn’t listen to it, but more because I know that’s all they have, and now I know there’s so much more. She had thought that “cravings” and “bad” foods and striving to eat as little as possible were just facts of adult existence, particularly as a woman. But just trying to eat enough to support my uprising revealed to me how widely shared, carefully crafted, and brutally protected those delusions were. Building back muscle was a much slower process than I ever realized; even as a new lifter, a pound of muscle a month was all he could hope to gain. As my strength returned, I realized that everything I had needed to be protected; what I had lost turned out to be fundamental to the experience of living in my body.
When I started lifting weights, other women trying strength training assured me that “you don’t have to worry about getting bulky.” But now I know I didn’t have to worry that it would never happen, I didn’t have to worry that getting bulky would be the best part.
In the US, the National Eating Disorder Helpline is 1-800-931-2237.
