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A break from my normal habit of only reading fiction - A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting by Casey Johnston. Which I heard about because someone shared one of her posts on Bluesky.

Going in, I already knew the rough outlines of what the book would be about, since Casey has talked about it elsewhere online - her experience with disordered eating and exercise, and how starting to lift weights pushed her to learn important skills like "paying attention to how your body feels" and "accepting failure as part of the process of learning" and "eating enough food that your body can actually build muscle".

But my main takeaway is how wildly divergent people's experiences of growing up can be, within the same culture. Like, the range of messages seen in mass media is probably fairly consistent from person to person, but how one individual person interprets and reacts to those messages is really affected by the other real people in their life and how they talk about those messages. Part of me, reading Casey's book, is like "Girl, you lived like this? How could you have ever believed that stuff?" but the reason I didn't grow up believing terrible things about exercise and health is basically luck, not anything special that I did.

I was certainly not immune to the General Feeling That You Should Be Ashamed of Your Body, as a teenager, but I was raised to be profoundly skeptical of anyone trying to sell me something, plus I didn't know anyone in person who took fad diet and exercise tips seriously - so anytime I saw "lose 10 pounds with this one weird trick!" and all its siblings in TV, magazines, etc., my only thought was "All these things are scams to get your money and attention, they don't really work."

(I was so stuck in this "ads are lies" mindset that as a teen, when my mother talked me into buying Fancy Shampoo because a young lady should have proper shampoo, and I picked one that purported to make hair more shiny... and it actually did make my hair shiny... I was surprised and confused.)

Casey writes about seeing magazine articles about, like, self-confidence and body positivity interspersed with exercise tips, and not being able to take the body positivity seriously. I was reading probably similar things and having the opposite reaction.

I was sort of ironically insulated from the worse body / dieting things that can happen to a person because - although I absorbed the beauty ideal - I didn't think there was any point in trying to change myself to fit it.

Another tiny but honestly loadbearing factor is that I had an amazing high school health teacher (who was friends with some weightlifters, as he told us in class) and taught us two very important facts:
- That BMI and similar calculations are flawed and don't really measure health.
- That factoids like "running for x minutes only burns 100 calories" sound alarming because about three quarters of the calories you eat in a day go to powering your basic bodily functions - so you would need to eat almost as much even if you lay in bed all day, and using up "only" a few hundred calories through exercise is entirely reasonable.

Anyway I do highly recommend the book.