I’m not putting this under a cut, though it’s a long post, because if you read my blog you’ll want to read this.

Yesterday, after I had taken two friends of mine to the gym to train together–they beginners, myself with several years of experience lifting–one of the gym trainers approached me.

“It looked like you were training them,” he said.

“They weren’t paying me or anything,” I said.

There followed some harrumphing on his part about the risk of injury and the comment, “It looked like you didn’t get much of your own workout in. You should find someone of your own level to be your workout buddy. Your friends can do group classes.”

This conversation took place against an interesting background: a man training with his clearly inexperienced girlfriend.

At the time I didn’t argue–the gym is my second home and I don’t want to upset the equilibrium there. But I was angry.

When I grew up, I definitely had the idea that women did not lift weights. My father harrumphed at women who ‘looked like bodybuilders.’  My mother was active–in fact groundbreakingly so–and did judo as a teenager in the ‘70s and ran marathons before they were in vogue. But she didn’t lift weights. She didn’t train for strength. I recall only that she would do calf raises off the lowest step of the stairs in our house in order to grow her calves and ‘balance out her big butt.’

That was what women did, to me: delicately inflected, squeamishly undertaken exercises for aesthetic effect, as purposefully disinterested and languid in their execution as Kate Moss’s heroin chic. Women did not try too hard. Women did not strain. 

My young self rebelled against the idea of being seen as beautiful–or desirable, which is not the same thing, though the two are so often elided–just because my body had developed breasts and hips. I wanted a kind of beauty that was hard-fought and deserved.

So I became anorexic.

It fit the aesthetic of the time–Kate Moss and all that–but of course fell prey to the essential hypocrisy of that image. Be strong–by wasting your muscles. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Nothing? 

Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Well. For one thing, let’s examine the dichotomy set up in that famous little feel-bad soundbite (a dainty one, barely a mouthful–such a small bite one swallows it without tasting its arsenic bitterness).

Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Life’s great pleasures are at war. Taste something good, or feel good. One or the other. Never both.

I believed this to be true for most of my life.

It’s not.

You don’t have to choose between food and feeling good, feeling light in your  body. Feeling–what is ‘thin’?

Thin is not a feeling.

Or if it is, it is not a pleasurable one. Scraped thin, like–like what, like Bilbo Baggins after his contact with the One Ring, who described himself as ‘like butter scraped over too much bread’?

‘Not too full, having eaten an amount of food that is energizing but not ennervating’?  Sure. Good feeling.

I like feeling light, I like feeling like I carry my body with ease. I like being able to leap up stairs getting out of the subway and do pullups on scaffoldings in the street.

I like feeling desired and beautiful. I like it when people admire my body.

None of those feelings is ‘thin.’ 

Feelings–

What about the rusty tang of iron hefted overhead? The intoxicating ichor of effort on a sports field or in the gym? 

What about feeling strong? 

The race to lose weight is a race to the bottom. I felt ‘fat’ as an anorexic not because it was such a devious mental illnes, tut-tut those hysterical delusional women. No!  I felt ‘fat’–I felt ‘heavy’–because my muscles weren’t strong enough to support me. My starved brain added to my sense of low energy and torpor. And having come to believe that feeling effervescently light and energetic was part and parcel of being ‘thin’, of course I still felt like I was ‘fat.’ I had no muscle. And my skinniness was never effortless enough to satisfy.

There’s nothing wrong with trying hard. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be proud of your body because you built it. That part of my motivation wasn’t bad.

That’s why I lift weights. That’s why I want more people of all genders to lift weights.

That’s why I get so very, very angry when men gatekeep fitness. I get so angry that fitness is still substantially gendered: women do cardio. Men do weights. Men bring their inexperienced buddies in to train with them and the trainers don’t care: there’s a long tradition of male-to-male gym initiation, and most men never get trainers. But bring women (or nonbinary people) in to the gym and suddenly you threaten the gym trainer’s core market. Because God forbid women educate themselves about lifting.

By the way, I get it, I do: women don’t need to be shamed any more about what they ‘should’ do. And men are not immune to body image issues, some of them driven to unhealthy extremes to gain muscle AND to lose body fat, just like women.  And ‘strong is the new skinny’ is bullshit if what you really mean by ‘strong’ is ‘absurdly lean.’   But even government health guidelines indicate that all people should do BOTH strength training AND cardio.  I’m not saying here is One Thing you need to do–you can get stronger without a barbell and without a gym. I am saying educate yourselves. Get stronger. Push yourselves to do more. Get strong enough that you don’t need to ask men to help you move furniture. That’s a good feeling.

Here are some resources on lifting. Go forth and conquer.

T-nation (despite the testosterone-inflected name-and of course women have testosterone too– GREAT guide to basic strength training)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention bodybuilding.com, especially the Female Bodybuilding subforum.

Girls Gone Strong.

Lift Big Eat Big.

Lift Like a Girl–Nia Shanks.

Neghar Fonooni (does cool things with kettlebells)

Lindsay Cappotelli

And as always ask me fitness questions anytime, with the caveat that I am not a professional and clear it with your doctor before beginning a fitness routine.