Hey {{first name | reader}},
It’s Tuesday, which means your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week #19. One of the things I love about my gym is that it’s full of people training for entirely different reasons. College athletes. Retired marathoners. Men rebuilding knees. Women learning to deadlift at sixty-five.
Last week, after my workout, a woman told me I looked great. Her friend added, “You’ve got great shoulders.”
What I heard was: Great shoulders. Shame about the rest of it.
{{first name | Reader}}, I have been thinking about this for six straight days.
Ocean Beach, San Francisco
I wish that I could say that I am completely content with my body. I started ballet when I was five or six years old, and I was a committed young ballerina, growing from an awkward and clumsy child who couldn’t catch a ball to a graceful adolescent dancer. At the same time my body changed from a skinny little girl to a curvy girl whose body tended toward muscle, and I spent a lot of years trying to starve my body into looking like a ballerina instead of an athlete.
I missed meals and survived on Coca Cola1 in hopes of slimming into the tiny ballerina body, but one day I watched Renaldo Nehemiah run the hurdles, and it looked like flight to me.2 My leaps and pirouettes had always been the strongest weapons in my ballet arsenal, so I walked on to my high school track team, and said I want to hurdle. Almost no one did that. So they let me, and it turned out that all those years of ballet had made me strong, limber, and quick. I won a lot of races, and an athlete was born.
Most of the time I’m focused on being strong, what my body can do rather than how my body looks, but when people give me feedback, it’s seldom on how strong I am but how I look. When I’m in the gym I do compare myself to other women (and sometimes men) in the gym. I’m looking at how strong they are. “Am I the strongest lady in the gym today?” I ask myself.3
The aesthetics changed — heroin chic became Pilates lean became “strong is sexy” — but women are still expected to treat our bodies like public-facing projects.
There are still days when I obsess over the size of my thighs and my backside.
And then there are days like today when I hit a deadlift PR and feel profoundly grateful for them.
I remind myself to focus on being strong, being agile, and being the first person to the top of the hill at a difficult hike.
📖 ASK ME ANYTHING
Question: How did you learn to love your body?
Answer: Honestly, it’s a work in progress. I see so many images of women’s bodies that look nothing like mine being idealized. In the gym I look at other women and focus on the time and effort that they put in, and I try to judge myself by the same standards I admire in other women: effort, consistency, capability, resilience.
I remind myself of all that my body can do, and how it supports the life that I lead, and I feel grateful.
💡 MYTH BUSTING
Myth: You have to be lean to be fit.
Reality: Body composition is substantially determined by genetics. Training hard changes what your body can do far more reliably than it changes what your body looks like. A woman can train hard, be genuinely strong, and still look soft or carry more body fat. A man can have very strong, very skinny legs. Most of us don’t look like body builders because we neither train nor eat like body builders. Honestly, this is probably for the best. Most women can lift surprisingly heavy without accidentally becoming a professional bodybuilder, despite what the pink dumbbell section of the internet would have you believe.
🍽️ RADISH FUEL BOX:
The teenage version of me survived on Coca-Cola and resentment. The current version eats to perform. Post-lift staple when I don't want to cook: sliced turkey on rye crispbread with mustard, pickles, and arugula. Crunchy, fast, no cooking, no mushiness.
Turns out fueling performance is a lot more satisfying than fueling a body you resent.
📚 WORTH YOUR TIME
A 2023 study in the Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal looked at the relationship between maximal strength training and positive body image, exploring the lived experiences of female powerlifters. The finding won't surprise you: women who participated in resistance training programs improved their body image perceptions significantly more than those in walking programs. Lifting heavy changes not just what your body can do, but how you see it. Science continues its long journey toward discovering things female athletes figured out years ago.
💪 TRY THIS WEEK
Set a Performance PR This Week
Pick one lift and find your current max — deadlift, squat, overhead press, whatever you've been doing. Write it down. Then set a target: 5% more in six weeks. Post it somewhere you'll see it. When you're tempted to notice how you look, look at the number instead. Your body is a vehicle. Give it a destination.
Stay strong,
{{first name | reader}}
P.S. Great shoulders. Also great everything else. Moving on.
1 In fairness to 1980s teenage girls, Diet Coke had just been invented and nobody was supervising us properly.
2 Four-time world record holder in the 110m hurdles, later played wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers. Look him up. The man moved like punctuation.
3 The answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no, and always motivating either way.