Casey Johnston once spent her life trying her very hardest to disappear, counting calories and logging miles of cardio so she could watch herself shrink. Now, she’s a powerlifting enthusiast and writer known around the internet as the “Swole Woman,” with a new memoir, A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting, which not only traces her path from dieter to lifter, but gives context around the science and history of lifting. In the book, Johnston explains how impactful her weightlifting journey has been, not only changing her physique (she memorably compares the look of her back muscles to a sack full of big, ropy snakes) but her mindset and gradual shift from seeing her body as an opponent, to the house that she lives in, something to take care of and enjoy, and her life along with it.
“There was a point where I felt like lifting was reshaping how I thought about everything,” Johnston recently told Vanity Fair. “Not just like, ‘Oh, I’m stronger.’ But it was making me see my relationships and my work and all of these things in a new light, and my role within them, and my being able to pay new attention to my feelings about them. I just felt really early on in the process that there’s more to this than just what happens in the gym.”
In 2014, when she picked up a barbell for the first time, everything changed. She realized that just as important as it was to learn to pick up something heavy, she also needed to find her limits— confront burdens that were too much for her to bear. Once she started telling a certain hip corner of the internet about it, via an advice column on the bygone feminist website The Hairpin, her message spread.
What began as a new workout program that she felt too shy to tell people about eventually turned into something she couldn’t stop talking about. The column, Ask a Swole Woman, discussed not just the technicalities of lifting and nutrition, but offered advice for handling mansplainers that was just as applicable on the sidewalk as it was in the gym, or encouraging readers to “embrace having the hands of a 17th-century whaler,” callouses and all. Johnston’s conversational and approachable missives were as much about confidence and passion as they were about getting jacked. She wasn’t just about telling you “how to get a big juicy ass in time for summer,” but also about the societal factors that led to that desire, and the science behind the squeeze.
When The Hairpin shuttered, Johnston’s work moved to Self and then Vice, and now lives on as a 25,000-subscriber strong newsletter, She’s a Beast, with an attendant Discord community with thousands of active users who compare gains and memes, plus the recently released book, and even a beginner strength training guide, Liftoff: Couch to Barbell, that she sells through her website.
Now, her writing is still about lifting, but also often about how to find the motivation to get through the day and just keep trying in this political climate, as in a recent near-sermonic essay. She began by telling the story of the Black Panthers starting a free breakfast program for schoolkids, wended through FBI raids and strength training and marathon metaphors, talked about how when nothing matters, everything matters, and ended by reminding readers that “These are the simplest rules of physics: stagnation begets stagnation, but motion begets motion. Go. We need you.”
Make no mistake: A Physical Education is no lifting manifesto. It’s about powerlifting in the same way that Friday Night Lights is about football—it’s there, all over the place, but you don’t have to participate in it or love it to understand it as a metaphor for life, man. “It’s not a super action-oriented book,” Johnston says. “I have a separate book that’s a lifting program.”
Johnston, now the parent of both a four-month-old son and a one-week-old memoir, spoke with Vanity Fair about getting jacked to fight fascism, reclaiming protein from the MAGA set, and how she learned to fail—and loved it.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Vanity Fair: There’s so much in the memoir about the mind-body connection that you discovered through lifting, and not just in the “I need to think about doing this with my body to pick that up without hurting myself” way, but also in speaking up for yourself elsewhere in life and feeling empowered and strong. Can you talk a little more about realizing how strong that connection is?
Casey Johnston: I just saw so much metaphor in a lot of the elemental parts of lifting. Part of lifting [is] asking yourself, “How does that feel?” You have to ask that question and come up with an answer to the extent you’re able, because all of lifting revolves around challenging yourself to an appropriate degree. You have to know: was the weight too light? Was it too heavy? How did your form feel? What muscles were you feeling? You’re not always gonna know answers to these questions, especially at the beginning, when you’re like, “I don’t know how anything feels, I don’t know what heavy feels like, I don’t know what light feels like,” but it develops this practice of inquiry into your experience of something, which is huge for somebody like me. A lot of my personal background and my family life revolved around pushing my feelings down, trying to create feelings of safety. By maximally trying to protect myself, watching everybody else and trying to do what they were doing, that meant that I had almost zero sense of my own experience. I was adjusting based on all of the instructions I was getting from the outside.
I saw a lot of connection between this practice, developing a sense of how I felt within lifting, as well as outside of lifting, especially in this world where it’s often the burden of women, that we’re expected to always contort ourselves to accommodate everyone else. I saw resonance there. It felt so clear to me. For a while, I think I either didn’t know how to say it, or I felt like everyone saw or experienced the same thing, and then I realized maybe they didn’t have the same understanding of it that I’ve felt. And I was like, I need to put this into words somehow.
And it continues, this is not something that you only do when you’re new to lifting. Even when you’re burned out, it facilitates this practice of asking yourself what you need right now, and a lot of times, in a moment where you’re struggling, what you’re capable of or able to tolerate is going to be really different from what you’re used to at your maximum capacity, or your everyday, but it’s so important to be able to adjust and be responsive to yourself. That’s a huge source of burnout: we are operating in a way that is too divorced from what we’re able to reasonably give. We’re being asked for too much and giving too much and are not able to protect ourselves enough. So having this maybe not perfectly developed practice, but being on this road of attuning to your own needs, is important.
Your writing about the idea of failure, and that in lifting you need to not only accept that there will be weights too heavy, but to learn to seek that out, had me gasping in recognition. Can you talk a little more about learning to embrace failure?
I started to worry that that part was almost too simplistic, but at the same time, it’s something that I struggled with so much, not even really realizing that that was exactly what I was afraid of. My self worth was so staked on never making a mistake, which is an impossible way to live. If I continued that way, I was just going to impoverish my experience of life so badly. And it’s such a shame.
I’m sure you’ve had this experience, having kids, but recently somebody asked, How does this—strength stuff in general, or this book, or your relationships with your parents—how does it shape how you think about your relationship with your child? And it’s just like, God, I would be devastated if he felt for a single minute, any of this. This much fear of failure, this much self doubt, or feeling like he deserves to suffer in this way of, like, no one will accept you if you don’t diet enough. It’s so awful, and it’s so hard for me to conceive of it as being awful for myself. But this is, at its root, what I guess I believe I deserve, which is such a shame. That’s a hard thing for people to admit, but when I frame it in the context of [my] own child, it feels totally different. Why are any of us doing this to ourselves? It’s awful.
Things are obviously very different now than they were during Trump’s first administration, and for you personally. Now, being a parent and being in a different place in your career and your weightlifting journey, older, everything, how are you feeling differently this time around?
It was so difficult to find out we were gonna go through this all over again, like Groundhog Day. And not only that, but obviously now it immediately turned out to be even worse.
There was a push at the time of the first election that now more than ever, we need each other. We need mutual aid, and we have to cultivate our own bright spots in the darkness, so to speak. I only feel more like that 1747317005, like the only thing to do is to focus on the impact that you can make, and to not be overwhelmed by it all. We get overwhelmed by everything in general, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by [the feeling that] there’s all these people making all of these impacts, I’m only one person, I don’t really know what I’m doing. But almost anything you do, as opposed to sitting there feeling like you don’t know what to do, is time well spent. I understand the impulse to experience this as spectacle, but experts on the topic of tyranny and fascism will tell you that’s one of the worst things you can do, to become inert and stymied in the face of so much terrible stuff going on. The whole point [of fascism] is to make it feel worthless to do anything. So when you’re like, what’s the point of bringing food to a community refrigerator when there’s immigrants being yanked off the street by plainclothes cops? It does make a difference, and there’s never been a more important time to believe that. Just take it on faith and keep moving the best that we can, is how I’m thinking about all of this.
The MAGA bros especially are so into protein right now. Do you feel defensive of it?
There’s always been this perception of strength training as a thing that is more conservative and the provenance of really, any job that you have to do that involves a physical fitness test, like military or police. The world of gyms has felt very skewed toward that audience for quite a long time. The way that I think about all this stuff is that protein is a tool and lifting weights is a tool, and tools are neutral. You can dress them up as tools of fascism, or they can be tools of collective strength for the people, enabling a sort of foundational amount of health and wellness for everyone. It’s all in how it’s used. Lifting weights is not inherently a thing that fascists or alt-right people do or are drawn to. That’s all structural, and the structure could be different. We can make it different based on how we engage with it and who engages with it.
Sometimes it feels like body positivity, in some corners of the internet, has gone full circle and acknowledging that you have a body and that you might want to intentionally do things for its benefit is seen as problematic. What do you think of the “everything is diet culture” reaction?
I think that’s why the tool metaphor is so useful. It’s like, obviously certain things are going to be more given to us self-harming with them than not. But I have to push back on the idea that it’s inherently disordered to work out, for instance, or inherently disordered to have some structure to what you eat. My counterpoint is described in the book, but the highest ideal for certain crowds is intuitive eating, which is great if it works for you. I really felt that my intuition was so broken after years of dieting, I would try to eat intuitively, and it just didn’t work for me. I could not get the protein I needed to build my muscle back. I couldn’t eat enough a lot of the time. I don’t want to say my challenges are the same as everybody’s, but it was a challenge, and not just in a sort of, “I’m mentally resisting” way, but my signals from my body were not reliable for that purpose.
So many times in your book, you write about being the only woman at the gym and feeling self-conscious. Have things changed in the years since you first walked into the gym? What’s the culture like?
In the last several years, I’m definitely seeing more women. There’s tons more gyms where the specific focus is on being inclusive. They make a point of being welcoming to LGBTQ people, they try to do more community outreach to people of different economic circumstances and I see more older people, and I see more teens, whereas the average gym bro is a 20-to-40-year-old white guy. But I’m seeing much wider demographics, literally, little groups of teenagers who will be gathering around a bench and taking turns and spotting each other. And I get so many older women writing to me like, “I’m 72 but just trying strength training for the first time and loving it.” It’s great.
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