Why I wish I started lifting in my twenties
Casey Johnston
tw: many disordered behaviors and food numbers; if you hate them, skip down to the "Eat" section!
Let’s say lifting weights got away from me in my teens. No problem—a woman in her twenties is, if anything, even better suited to start lifting. Her potential to grow is the same, but she’s saddled with none of the hand-wringing about (overblown) risks or injury that accompanies teen lifting. If she were destined to be an elite-elite and had gotten started in her teens, she might already be competing nationally or even internationally by her twenties. But as for me, a normal, I did not have that ability. Spending time lifting in my teen years wouldn’t have added much to my overall athletic resume except general experience, and there would be plenty of time for that still if I’d started early in my twenties.
But I didn’t spend my twenties lifting. I didn’t start lifting until I was 27, and only because I’d started accumulating injuries and getting fed up with running farther and faster for years, only to never feel like I could just relax for once and eat dessert. I stuck with running and restrictive dieting for several years, and actively chose them over lifting, which I feared, for a bunch of reasons that I later found out ranged from slightly to completely wrong.
Restricting myself to 1,200 calories a day was a giant, destructive mistake. I started my problematic dieting in earnest around the age of 20, after I’d gained about 15 pounds in college. I started eating 1,200 calories a day. If I’d been studied in the lifting arts, I would not have ever been caught dead doing this, because I would have known that this risked depleting the muscle that I needed to live and move around (and, ironically, the muscle that allowed me to, uh, burn the energy I did have). Even in a coma, my body uses more than 1,500 calories per day. Once I started lifting, I was able to cut body fat at no less than 1,850 calories per day. I maintained on 2,200-2,300 calories per day. 1,200 calories per day was far, far too extreme of a deficit. It wasn’t long before I started getting symptoms of dieting too much for too long—feeling constantly cold, brittle nails, slow-growing hair, spiraling thoughts—but didn’t know what they were.
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