The power of ditching the diet: Casey Johnston

For years, American writer and editor Casey Johnston was subscribed to a lifestyle of eating only 1200 calories a day and doing more and more cardio in a bid to lose more weight.

That is until Johnston spent a year mulling over taking a risk after stumbling on a viral blog post about one woman's experience of lifting heavy weights - no dieting, no cardio, no weight loss, and no shame or guilt.

In her new book - A Physical Education - How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting which is a mash-up of memoir, science writing and cultural critique - Johnston takes down the insidious and “mentally, physically and emotionally destructive” diet culture.

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Johnston, who is also the creator of She's A Beast newsletter, says she had a misperception that the recommended 2000-calorie daily average for women was too much.

“I was running more and more and eating less and less, just wanting to sort of lose the last five pounds [2kg],” she tells Saturday Morning.

“I mean, I had a misperception that anytime I ate that much [2000 calories] that I would gain weight like crazy, and that was actually a few different factors at play that I was misreading, that I didn't know how to interpret, but I felt that there was just no way I could eat that much…

“But ultimately, after reading more about it and [I] learned that a certain number of calories that it takes to even gain a real pound of body weight, and if you sort of spread that across days and weeks of eating, you can eat quite a bit more than I was eating and that should only amount to a few pounds gained.”

When Johnston came across the woman in the viral post, it made her re-evaluate her thoughts that lifting weights would lead to “bulking up” – because the photos of the woman showed she hadn’t.

“I had never thought that you could diet away your muscle. But it turned out that that's what I had, my body had basically been consuming it in order to keep me alive.”

Johnston says after a year of research, she decided to take a leap of faith and began eating more and adopted a fully body workout with free weights. That’s when she realised the negative impacts of her previous lifestyle.

“I felt cold a lot of the time, which is a physical side effect of dieting too much. I felt weak.

“I think I'm moody in general, but I was moodier then for sure. It made me sort of more emotionally labile to be on this diet all of the time, which are not effects that people talk about very much…

“Previously, a 40-pound box of cat litter had been a lot of weight to me and now I was able to reach that point of lifting that much weight in the gym in a matter of weeks.”

She notes the aesthetic changes were subtle enough that even people around her didn’t comment on her appearance and her clothing size remained the same.

People stuck in a “mental prison of needing to diet more” are wanting to attain an impossible standard under the belief that losing weight means being healthy and looking good, she says.

“It's not actually healthy to either always be losing weight, to be yo-yoing up and down, or to be really even very skinny...

“So this all becomes a way really of keeping us focused on these goalposts that continually are moving around, that we're trying to follow the bouncing ball of being as attractive as possible and always losing weight when it's like these things actually really negatively affect us in so many ways."

While women may be particularly vulnerable to the spread of these ideologies, anyone can be manipulated into sacrificing their body for some promised gain, which keeps them subdued in a capitalist society, she says.

“If people who are motivated by malicious intent are able to separate us from our bodies by convincing us that it's important to diet, that it's important to always be losing weight, that it's important to do these things in order to be ‘presentable’, then they can really keep us in a box and not in focused on ourselves and what we are ‘doing wrong’ versus what the greater problems are that are influencing our need to control ourselves that much.”