The world wants you to be smaller

But Casey Johnston wants you to get swole

Like many women, I’ve spent most of my life trying to take up less space — to fit into smaller clothes and to eat just a little less. No one was alarmed in college when my jeans were so big I had to roll over the waist to make them stay up. Everyone applauded when, after college, I started running to work off the extra weight I was beginning to gain. The women around me all wanted to become smaller, too: sucking in their stomachs in mirrors, trying fad diets like Beyonce’s cayenne and lemon juice drink and, before Instagram, putting up pictures of beautiful models on the dorm room walls for thinspiration.

Pregnancy was the first time I let my body expand. I couldn’t stop it. My body wanted to be large. Even when I was so sick for the first 20 weeks of my first pregnancy, I couldn’t stop gaining weight. My doctor asked me if I was eating nothing but milkshakes, and I was furious when I told her I could barely stomach food, that I was gaining weight seemingly from nothing. She didn’t believe me and told me to watch my intake, warning that when pregnancy was over, I’d want to get back to my “pre-baby body” immediately, and every hamburger made it that much harder.

I recount all of this simply to note that I am an American woman. I came of age watching my mom eat grapefruit, then try Nutra-Slim, then join Weight Watchers. I was formed on repeated watchings of America’s Next Top Model and Bridget Jones’ Diary. Sick with mono in college, I wondered how much weight I could lose. Even before I wondered when I would start to feel better. Even before I thought to worry about how I would pass my classes.

In her viral poem “Shrinking Women,” Lily Myers observes that the women in her family have been shrinking for decades:

We all learned it from each other,

the way each generation taught the next how to knit,

weaving silence

in between the threads

which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house,

skin itching,

picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket

on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again.

Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled.

Deciding how many bites is too many.

How much space she deserves to occupy.

When I had my daughter, I was terrified of all that the world would do to her. Of what I would do to her with my own judgments about myself. Teaching my daughter to love herself meant I had to learn to do the same. Never wanting her to be less, I resolved to find out how to be more.

It has been an imperfect journey. I had another baby, and I started trying to do strength training at home with pirated PDFs from fitness influencers that promised to guide me to a beach body. Then one of my friends encouraged me to take a kettlebell class she taught, which focused, for the first time, not on whittling our bodies down, but building them back up. That class fell apart in 2016, but by then, Casey Johnston was offering advice on a website called The Hairpin. Her “Ask a Swole Woman” column reframed questions of fitness such as “How can I get abs?” not by recommending that the question-asker eat less, but gently asking whether having visible abs was a realistic goal.

I read the column religiously and started therapy. I also got divorced, and for the first time in my life, started weight training in earnest. The stress from the divorce had caused me to lose weight, but I was starting to get bigger in other ways; my thighs were bulking and my shoulders were stronger. My goals were no longer to hit a target goal weight but to increase my mile time and to successfully level up to the next set of weights.

Throughout it all, Casey Johnston’s “Ask a Swole Woman” has been my intermittent guide, encouraging me to get larger and take up space. When Johnston talked about getting strong to lift bags of kitty litter, I began to think more deeply about my own strength as a single woman — it meant moving furniture, lifting 30lb bags of dog food, carrying my kids just a little bit longer.

In Johnston’s book Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting, she chronicles the journey of her own body, writing about doing relentless amounts of cardio before picking up weights. Being able to lift weights, Johnston learned, meant being strong, and being strong meant eating food. When the goal was strength, the way there became not diminishing, but nourishing herself.

Johnston’s book is not about body positivity — a movement begun by Black women as a way to liberate and decolonize the way we talk about bodies. A movement that has become commercialized and corporatized until it often feels as empty as an Instagram platitude or a FYP filled with skinny white influencers, sticking out their bellies, noting in the captions, “lol sometimes I’m not always social media perfect.”

Writing in the Guardian in 2023, Rachel Pick observed, “Now, with the rise of Ozempic after a brief period of so-called body positivity, there is an all-too-neat convergence taking place, where promises that were made to Black communities in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement are experiencing a large-scale corporate and cultural rollback…This is a classic sleight-of-hand trick that corporations do when they’re in hot water: instead of removing the source of the problem, they promise to throw some money in the opposite direction. As soon as we look away for just a second, they stuff their promises right back up their sleeves.”

The slow erosion of body positivity was an early indicator of how America was changing. In 2025, America has given up on inclusion. Our government is deporting black and brown bodies, criminalizing trans bodies, and taking the rights away from bodies with uteruses.

In America, our very personhood is on the line.

Johnston’s book does not offer direct solutions to the return of the diminishing body. She simply asks us to think about our power. She weaves together her own physical education with a brief history of powerlifting and a short but interesting discussion on the role that wealth and class play in the perception of bodies and strength. Strength as a way to serve power was good. But strength as a way to subvert power, or replace it, was not.

She concludes that section by observing, “This goes double for women, whose bodies are already maniacally scrutinized and controlled. Enforcing the importance of diet and weight loss literally keeps everyone, especially women, in a weakened state. Therefore, actually gaining strength is a stacked threat. Strong women reflect a double rejection of the status quo — they’re not just strong, but they are the sex who ‘shouldn’t’ be strong. It’s no wonder strong women are so feared and so vilified, why I was made to be so afraid of them, and made even more afraid of becoming a strong woman. When strength is oriented against power, instead of in its support, there’s no telling what it might accomplish.”

Her book is an argument not just for personally getting strong, but for women’s physical strength, which has always been dismissed in comparison with male strength. Here, Johnston goes to research and points out the ways that women’s physical abilities match and sometimes exceed men's, in ways that are often culturally overlooked — stamina, recovery, resiliency.

She also offers insight on the power of rest. Writing, “Creating strength is actually a process of rupture, rest, and repair: within our cells, as well as metaphorically, within our psyche. It involves becoming attuned inward, getting to know and being generous to ourselves, learning where we are at and what we need. I’d always been taught that progress was a matter of raw bravery and grit and willingness to suffer, when in fact it requires understanding, self-regard, and patience. It requires respect for our bodies’ elegant, interconnected, inextricable systems of muscle, bone, blood, reflex, and memory.”

As she unlearns the lessons of diet culture, Johnston encourages us to think about what makes us strong. Strength needs sleep, it needs ice cream, it needs us to allow our bodies to repair, before we get back to the grind. Strength can only be made through embracing the things diet culture teaches us to eschew — lying around, eating food.

The nagging question for many people, especially women, when lifting weights is, “What if I get big?” Johnston’s answer to this question is a shrug. So what? What’s a few pounds when the gains are so great? Johnston loves her strength more than she loves being small.

Physical Education doesn’t promise easy answers, but it does offer some ways to get through.

Johnston ends her book with the image of her mother, who herself is struggling to get free from a life of shrinking, telling her daughter that she’s going to the gym.

Recently, my own daughter started lifting with me. She began by joining me for body-weight exercises in the basement; then she joined the swim team and began her own weightlifting routine. In encouraging her to eat, I ate too. In encouraging to love her bigness, I began to love mine as well. I kicked the scale under the bed.

Sometimes she flexes to show how strong and powerful she is, and we like to jokingly compare gains. And we have a friendly pull-up competition in the basement, each of us trying to get just one more rep than the other. I am winning, but it won’t be long until she beats me. And her brother, too, has wondered out loud when he can start lifting weights “like a girl.”

I don’t think we’ve solved it. We are still bodies in a world that is trying to force us to be smaller, be less, and in some cases, disappear. We cannot always save the world by what we do with our bodies. But we can learn to get stronger.

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Get your own physical education

• Buy Physical Education from Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

• Johnston also has a newsletter, “She’s a Beast.” And she has a “couch to barbell” guide for people just getting into weight lifting.

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Other resources

In the subscriber-only conversation on Monday, a few newsletter readers suggested different resources when it comes to navigating our fleshy reality and I thought I’d pass them along.

• In an episode of KC Davis’ podcast Struggle Care, she talks to Imani Barbarin about disability, bodies, and justice.

• A recent episode of the

  Diabolical Lies
  podcast talks about the new right-wing aesthetic.

• The Maintenance Phase podcast.

• The Nutrition Tea Substack

• And, as always,

  Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith