The internet is full of promises about your body.

28-day challenges, before-and-after photos, new nutrition hacks, and calorie tracking tools.

If you have ever fallen down a rabbit hole of fitness and body content, you know how it goes.

One video leads to another. one diet plan to the next.

Casey Johnston knows this world intimately.

She grew up in the 90s in a family where being thin mattered.

In college, she started running, counting calories, doing the math of subtracting what she burned from what she ate,

with the goal of always getting to a smaller

number. But then, the same Internet that had taught her to measure her self-worth and calories

withheld served up something different, a post about weightlifting and about getting stronger

and feeding your muscles the food they need to grow.

She joined a gem and started to lift and slowly abandoned the call of weighing less.

And now when people search online for the next diet or workout routine, they might find Casey instead.

You may have encountered her lifting advice

column, Ask a Swole Woman, or her substack newsletter, she's a beast. Her voice cuts through a lot of

noise, not promising transformation, but offering something else, community, joy, insight into the geeky side of weightlifting.

And Casey has a new memoir called A Physical Education, How I Escapeed Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting.

In it, she describes her life before weightlifting.

Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.

Her father struggled with alcoholism and died when she was in college.

And in her 20s, she describes being in an abusive relationship.

When we talked, Casey described how these difficult experiences trained her to please, to disassociate, to hide.

...