A Physical Education with Casey Johnston
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Concept
motor normativity
It’s the idea that society acts like driving is the default “normal” choice. If you choose to walk instead, some people react because it goes against what they’re used to.
Concept
car dominance
“Car dominance” means cars have become the main way society is built around. So people often assume you should drive even when walking would be easy.
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This episode of the War on Cars is sponsored in part by Upway.
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There are a lot of people there.
The servers seem nice.
You can capture all of this information and have this enriched experience of the world
that you can when you're going by at even 15 miles an hour.
This is the War on Cars.
I'm Doug Gordon.
With me is my co-host, Sarah Goodyear.
Hey there, Doug.
Great to be back in the studio.
We've been on the road for a very long time.
Feels weird to actually be sitting here in Brooklyn.
I know.
We're together in Brooklyn.
I feel very cozy and at home.
We get a very luxurious week and a half before we have to go back out on the road.
Feels very expansive today.
There's a lot you can do in a week and a half at home.
That's true.
Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah, let me ask you a question.
I know the answer to this, but do you lift weights?
I do indeed lift weights, and I try to lift heavy.
You do?
I do.
What's your bench in, bro?
I'm getting back up there, but there was a time when I was benching my body weight,
so I'm hoping to get back there.
That's better than I can do for sure.
I do not lift weights, although I'm a runner.
As we're going to talk about, I think I struggle with some of the same things that our guest
writes about early in her book.
But first, before we get to that, we do have to do a little business.
You can find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash the War on Cars pod.
You can also order our book, Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the
automobile wherever books are sold.
You can find out more about that and also learn all about our book tour, which is still
going on amazingly enough and will be going on through 2035, at least through the end
of 2026.
You can find all the information about that at lifeaftercars.com.
Okay.
I'm really excited about this because I have been following our guests for a long time.
Awesome writer, great thinker, all of the things that are good about our world today.
I think she's covering in her newsletter and in her books and grappling with some really
important issues.
It's going to be a weird episode because I think the relationship between our issues and what
our guest covers are not immediately obvious.
However, a number of our listeners suggested that we have our guest on.
So let's get to it.
Americans are, as we all know, simultaneously obsessed with health and wellness.
But we also have some of the worst health outcomes of any developed nation.
And that's because so much of wellness culture pushes the responsibility for staying healthy
onto individuals and ignores so many of the structural barriers that prevent people from
moving their bodies or accessing healthy food.
If you add in the ways in which our society polices people's bodies, especially women's
bodies and the ways in which everybody obsesses over the latest fad diet or fitness craze,
it can kind of feel impossible to cut through the noise.
Our guest is someone who does her best to help people make sense of it all, combining a background
in science and journalism with her own personal experience with diet and exercise, Casey
Johnston.
She's the bestselling author of Lift Off, Couch to Barbell and A Physical Education, How I
Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting, which was published last year.
Casey's work covers politics, identity, health, technology, power, womanhood and embodiment.
She, to me, is a voice of rationality and reason in an area and a world that can often feel
very irrational and unreasonable.
Casey Johnston, welcome to the War on Cars.
Thank you.
Wow, what a great introduction.
I'm going to have to write that down for myself because that was awesome.
Oh, I'm a big fan and as are many of our listeners.
So like I said, actually a number of people wrote to us after one of your newsletters came
out, you have a newsletter called She's a Beast.
We'll put a link in the show notes to that.
And a number of people wrote to us and said, you got to have Casey on that newsletter.
It was about what you called the plot to strangle Americans of life, liberty and happiness.
And it was a response to new dietary guidelines from the FDA.
And as you call him, pull up idiot RFK Jr.
Which the reference is like the dude is doing pull ups like in the airport and wherever
he can find something to hang his body off of.
He's got one thing that he's good at.
So yes, but he's also not good at them.
Like somebody interviewed me about this.
There was a point where he did pull ups in an airport, but like he does sort of half
pull ups, he's not even doing a full extension, which is like that doesn't count.
None of those count.
You know, it's like everyone's like, oh, he did 20 put ups.
He did zero pull ups.
And also when he does them, when he's wearing like the jeans and no shirt.
I don't know.
It's just the guy doesn't have the aesthetics down and he doesn't have the technique down either.
He's got the steroids down.
That's sort of the like nobody's really talking about that when they're doing
their MAHA press conferences.
But yeah, also he put out these guidelines.
Yeah, they put out these new nutritional guidelines, which Casey, maybe you can talk
about real briefly, you kind of say like the math doesn't math.
I'll start by saying that the dietary guidelines have never been like amazing.
Never everyone's favorite thing.
But these dietary guidelines, they're definitely styled after a kind of carnivore
diet mindset, and they have some fundamental inconsistencies that can't really be reconciled.
If you're trying to stick to them to the letter, one of the recommendations they
make is to consume whole like full fat dairy and meats and also to keep saturated
fat intake below 5% of your caloric daily intake.
Yes, but the amount of saturated fat that is present in even lean meats and full
fat dairy is so high if you're taking in the amount that you're supposed to, but
also trying to keep your saturated fat low.
It's like those things can't happen.
Like this was one of a few arguments that I made that was like we're being set up
to fail so badly.
Like to the extent that we have a culture and a political structure that puts so much
burden on us to do so much right and like really wants us to thread a needle, like
it's gotten to a point where it is impossible to achieve a basic amount of health if
we're trying to do what's provided for us by the structures that be.
In your newsletter, you write, and this is where it overlaps with war on cars
territory. It's circus level ridiculous to place the onus of nutritional
responsibility in quotes on a person who has to say drive 30 minutes to a Walmart
where the produce is crap, tasteless and overpriced.
You talk about, you know, the types of foods that you can get at such places.
And that really cuts to the heart of our movement.
You write one of the main differentiators in physical activity and well being is
equitable access and use of active transport, walking, cycling, public
transportation that enables both walking and cycling.
That is to say the exercise we could all be getting without having to go out and
make a point of working out at a gym.
You know, I just feel like that's it.
That's the war on cars right there.
There's so many embodied health problems with the way we have set up our society
that to wag our fingers at people and say, you just need to work out more, which
is really the RFK ethos, like just be healthy and you'll be healthy.
You know, that's sort of where we're at, where he never gets at the structural
issues that are leading people to, say, deal with chronic diseases or things like that.
I've grappled a lot with thinking about this because there is a whole dimension
of this dialogue that can be very shaming to people.
That's just like sort of you need to take it on the chin and like bike to work
or you need to walk to work or you need to just pick a job that's closer to your
house so that you can walk to work.
And it's like the way that things are set up now is no one can make those
choices like the in writing this piece.
I came to a conclusion that's kind of like not only do we not have equitable
access sort of to like, oh, I'm going to bike or I'm going to take a car.
I feel like you can't leave your house in not a car.
Lately, obviously, I'm preaching the choir here, but it's really wild that
it's gotten to that point.
Yeah.
And then doing everything in a car becomes super normalized.
And then anything that's not a car becomes kind of counter cultural, which is
really frustrating to us, obviously, because there's nothing counter cultural
about walking.
It's the way that humans have evolved over, you know, hundreds of thousands
of years to do this thing.
And that that fundamental thing is something that now is a rarefied experience
and also the affordability thing really plays into it in such a terrible way
that so many of the places where you can walk to a job, to a grocery store, to
anything are ridiculously expensive in this country so that a walkable lifestyle
has become a luxury good.
And it's just like, no, that's exactly the opposite of how it should be, right?
I was watching someone's YouTube video on jaywalking, which I'm sure you've
covered at length.
And I think I might have even mentioned it in this piece that I wrote.
But like, roads were for people for for walking people until I mean, I'm not
exactly sure when the jaywalking campaign really took hold 1920s, 1930s.
So 100 years or so and all before that, roads were for people.
So it's it's it's gotten extra ridiculous to me since kind of connecting
those dots, the idea that I should get out of the road from my bike or on my
feet because a car wants to be there.
Well, this is why I loved your newsletter piece because it was reaching
an audience that might not normally think about these things because they're
not confronted with them in the way that we obviously try to confront people
with them.
But of course, not everyone's listening to the war on cars, not everyone's
reading, let's say Peter Norton's book, which talks about the history of jaywalking.
So it's kind of great to see that, you know, the folks who are subscribing to
your newsletter for various reasons are we're getting hit with this, let's say,
you know, anti-car knowledge.
Well, I'll say that exercise generally in the world is achieved by people who
have it built into their lives in some form of going back and forth between
visiting their families, going to work, getting their groceries, all these things.
Like we have gotten to this point in our culture where we're trying to construct
a lane for exercise pretty artificially into our lives, which is something
that I've done and I've benefited from.
But I get tons of questions from people where they're like, I feel like I have
no time, no energy at the end of the day.
After all that I've done, maybe driving an hour back and forth to work and
taking care of my kids and doing all the housework and all these things that I'm
also supposed to work out and how do I do it?
And I mean, my answer to those people is just like, you're really busy.
Like please go easy on yourself.
But the real answer is that most other people don't have that burden of trying
to tack exercise on as this additional chore that they have to do and fit it
in artificially with anything else.
It sort of like flows naturally in their day.
Yeah, I describe a Fitbit as car infrastructure because, you know, if you
live in the suburbs, you kind of have to track your steps, even though there
are issues with the 10,000 steps metric.
But, you know, I don't ever really have to think about how many steps I'm getting
in a day. My kids don't really have to think about it.
They walk and take transit to school.
They walk or bike to friends homes or the park.
It's just not something that sort of enters into our mind.
And there's a reason why New Yorkers, even low income New Yorkers, on average,
we have a higher life expectancy than anybody in the US.
It's 83.2 years compared to 79 years nationwide.
And it's because walking or even just like climbing stairs from the subway,
you know, that's just part of our routine.
Carrying groceries a few blocks is part of our routine.
You know, this gets to one of the core things that I think you
articulate really well is that these things that we do exercise, eating
right, those are about functioning as a human being.
And unfortunately, I think that for many people, exercise and good nutrition
have somehow become divorced from function and become things unto
themselves that are things to worry about or do.
And we've lost that sort of virtuous cycle of, yes, if you are strong,
then you'll be able to pick up your groceries when you're carrying them.
Or if you walk a lot for transportation and you do come in and out of the
subway a lot on stairs, that means that as you age, your glutes are not
going to be wasting away the way that they would if you sit.
Our muscles are for our function.
They're not just to look good or to brag about.
If I want to pick something up in my real life, I can do it.
And especially as somebody who's, you know, getting a little older now,
I'm like, oh, I see how this happens.
I see how you lose it.
So I wonder if you could talk about like the way that you see what you write
about and what you talk about is just like getting functionality in the real
world back to people.
This was a big goal of a physical education when I wrote it was there's
this standard of good behavior, let's say, that I was trying to adhere to
through my earlier relationships with working out, which was doing a lot of
cardio and dieting a lot under this unrelenting pressure to look healthy,
quote unquote, to be skinny, to never be gaining weight like the ultimate sin.
And I was aware of rhetoric out there around exercise that's sort of like,
oh, you do it for yourself to feel good.
And I always felt that was kind of abstract.
So I wanted to dig a little deeper with this book and ask, why is it
exactly that I feel so much pressure?
And then I got into lifting and I felt a completely different relationship
to my existence where it was sort of constructive and enabling of my livelihood.
And I hadn't even realized the amount of distress that I felt over what I ate
and how much I exercised and in what way and that I could never do enough.
There's obviously a lot of cultural factors that come into pressure on women,
especially to look a certain way.
But a lot of it flows from our country's background with religion and capitalism.
The fact that putting pressure on people to worry about how they look takes
their eye off the ball of their own livelihood and what it is that they can do
to make themselves feel even a basic amount of capability to live their lives.
Like the more that your corporation or your boss or whoever can it can make you
feel like you're you have to balance on this razor edge of like maximum
productivity and barely surviving, the more they can convince you to compromise
your own personal health and your your own needs.
And I mean, that is sort of heaped double onto women.
I really felt the more that I got into lifting and the more that I fed myself.
This is sort of the theme of the book is that I felt like I could wake up to more
of like my relationship was not actually very good.
My my job was sort of taking advantage of me.
These were all things that I was used to sort of heaping the responsibility
on my own shoulders and our culture around food and exercise sort of enabled that.
I mean, your body is your, we would say in our tech times, like your avatar
for experiencing the world.
So when your body is constantly under threat, you learn to not trust your own
biological signals.
It gets to a point that it's scary for us to confront the possibility that
we're being either taken advantage of or we're we're accepting
responsibilities that are not our own.
I think there's a lot more going on than just like, oh, I learned to lift weights
because like it feels good sort of end of sentence.
Like there was a lot more that went into it for me.
I think that's a great segue into talking more about the book.
Actually, I found the book so wonderful to read because I think your journey,
obviously you're speaking a bit more to women because you are a woman and
like you're using that lens to talk about the experience of going to the gym,
let's say, but I've definitely, I mean, I'm sitting here right now with the
book tour 15 and something I've been wrestling with for a while and I have
tried everything and usually running works for me, but a lot of injuries have
happened to me along the way.
And I've, you know, shirked some other training because of the time that it
takes to get that stuff done.
It's interesting, Sarah, that you mentioned sort of like aging and lifting
stuff because Casey, you sort of talk about at the beginning of the book that
you're foray into this involved living in the city and having to get cat litter
home. I want to talk about that a little bit.
I feel like it's a very New York experience or a very city experience that
like, yeah, you're not just tossing the 40 pounds of cat litter into the back
of a truck or an SUV.
You are schlepping it home, many blocks.
I'll say I grew up, maybe not the middle of nowhere, but a very small town.
We moved to Albany when I was a little older, which is very car centric.
I never liked having a car.
So this is one of my main draws to New York was a no car lifestyle.
Like that was, that was big for me.
But when you get to New York, you, there's a real physicality to a lot of the
choice you have to do.
And one of them was I had two cats and due to my personal economics,
couldn't spend a lot of money on cat litter.
So I wanted to buy the largest possible box of cheap cat litter that I could find.
And that was a 40 pound box of cat litter.
So like for me, that's not a lot of weight now, but it's a lot of weight
for the average person.
And it's an awkward object, big cardboard box with a flimsy plastic handle.
I had to not only go out to the grocery store, which was a few blocks away.
I had to carry it back to my house, carry it up two flights of stairs.
And then there was the whole other task of trying to maneuver it to get the
cat litter into the box, which always ended up with it spilling all over the
place and just having cat litter everywhere.
So it was an ordeal.
So that kind of revealed to you that your body was not equipped
necessarily to live in this environment where it was going to be asked to do
certain physical things.
Well, I will say this is a connection I made later on in thinking about what was
the structure of my life prelifting and what changed significantly.
This was not something that I did.
And I was like, oh, I got to lift weights.
Like I still at that time had a conception of strength training that was
like some people are strong and some people are not strong.
And I am one of the not strong people.
I don't play football.
I'm not in the Olympics.
Like this is what I can do.
This is what I can offer.
And this is my lot in life is to struggle with the cat litter.
I did not think that was a changeable aspect of who I was at that time.
When you discovered weightlifting and you talk about sort of like going
onto a Reddit thread and learning about this one particular woman who got
stronger without bulking up, because that's one of the fears, right?
Like especially for women that weightlifting equals getting jacked,
getting bigger, gaining weight, adding all of this muscle, invisible ways that
our society tends to not like for women and women internalize that fear.
But that wasn't the case with this woman that you found online.
I found there to be a lot of parallels with sort of like this interesting
subculture that you find yourself in when you sort of have this awakening
about, oh, there's a different way of structuring my life that applied
very much to sort of my own journey with, let's say, cycling advocacy of like,
oh, you find these subcultures online.
And here's this person who's hauling 40 pounds of cat litter on the back
of a cargo bike or whatever.
You're like, huh, that could work for me.
But then, of course, your brain gets filled with the, oh, but it might be too hot.
I'll show up sweaty to work.
And you sort of have to unlearn all of these preconceived societal notions
about what is and isn't right, because we've all just lived under this
like dominant system, whether it's the patriarchy or motor normativity,
which have their similarities.
And so can you describe that kind of process of unlearning those cultural
stereotypes, let's say?
I mean, I will say this is not a fear that I endorse from this side of things,
but this was the position that I was in mentally.
And I think a lot of people are in, which is that we're really taught
to mortally fear the idea of gaining weight.
A lot of people are taught to fear the gym on the basis of like, it's dangerous.
You might not only get hurt by the equipment, but you might hurt yourself lifting.
I think there's slightly less belief of those things now than when I started
lifting, which was now 12 years ago.
But I just dismissed the idea that strength training would be for me out
of hand, because I had all of these preconceived notions that were fed to me
by the wider media world.
They kept me in this cycle of like, oh, you don't need to do that much.
Lifting is too hard, too intense, too involved, all these things.
You just need to eat 1200 calories a day and do lots of cardio.
So I got to a point where I was eating very little and I was running a lot
of running hours of running.
And then I found this post on Reddit by this woman who had just gotten into
lifting and she had been doing it for six months and her lifts had gone up.
She was lifting, let's say 75, 80, 100 pounds to me, a lot of weight.
I was like, whoa, but her body hadn't changed that much or like the changes
were very subtle.
She posted pictures of herself and the message to me was like, oh, I thought
lifting weights quote unquote makes you bulky.
I thought she should be like on a bodybuilding magazine by this point.
And yet she had changed a lot internally and like said that she was really enjoying
lifting, that she was eating a lot more, but that it had not turned her into this
like monster that I had been made to believe was what lifting did to you.
I mean, I learned a lot later that not only is that not what happens, but it's
like extremely difficult and involved to make that happen to your body anyway.
So it's a misplaced fear and it's one of those fears that is ingrained in us.
I mean, so many of these fears that percolate in the culture like are truly
just meant to keep us away from the good stuff.
But so once I saw this post, I was like, oh, I could see this person who had a
normal person's relationship with lifting.
That was not about being on the front of a magazine.
It was not about being on a morning show.
Nothing about like notability or being the elite of the elite.
It was like, here's a normal person talking about their normal experience.
So that was a real game changer for me to see that.
When I listened to you talking about that and talking about
our behavior and how our behavior is determined.
And yeah, we do talk on this show a lot about the concept of motor normativity
that basically we are 100 years into car dominance.
We're really strongly influenced to think that behaviors that we do,
that have to do with cars are normal and that other behaviors are not normal.
And I encounter this all the time.
And maybe you do too, if you're in a place that's actually it's walking distance,
but you're with people who are into driving and you'll say like, you know,
actually I'm going to walk there.
Oh, let me give you a ride.
Well, no, I don't want to ride.
I want to walk.
No, but it's so easy.
I can just, I can just say it's just take a few minutes.
And if you insist on your right to walk or your desire to walk,
it challenges the norm in a way that is frightening to people.
And so changing our behavior so often, I've definitely done this myself.
I've sort of said, I'm going to be polite and get in the car.
It's interesting because it's the same media systems that encourage us to be
dieting all the time.
It's that same kind of media system that in this case broke through to you.
And there was somebody inside that system who was showing you something different.
And it was something you were able to access through Instagram or whatever,
the same things that are perpetuating a lot of the bad stuff.
Because this is a big part of what we do, right?
Like we're trying to make people see just like you.
What is the water that we're swimming in and then want to do something about it?
So how can we help people to get a little stronger when it comes to pushing back on those norms?
It's very tricky to have an overarching thesis about it.
But I mean, I did get to a point where I was sort of fed up with what I was doing.
I think that was sort of significant.
I've said a lot that I don't know that anyone is equipped to really turn somebody around 180
degrees who's like, I love my car and I love driving.
And that's like my favorite thing in the whole world.
It's like, that's not your guy.
I don't have that recipe to convert that person.
But part of it is that you are asking what is your experience and that you're not always
going to have the answers right away that you have to keep asking.
Continuing to ask is part of it.
And I had never felt like my experience of anything mattered.
The point was just to sort of bear everything.
So when I hear you talking about resisting getting a ride versus walking somewhere,
what I sort of think of lately is especially when I've had to have this more deliberate
relationship with walking because in LA it's very encouraged to drive everywhere
is that it's such a richer experience sensorily.
Like you're feeling the breeze.
You can see so much more going on than when you're speeding by in a car,
even going at a slow speed.
Like you can see all these stories.
You can see who's in the restaurant.
What are they eating?
And like, are there a lot of people there?
The server seemed nice.
You can capture all this information and have this like enriched experience of the world
that you can't when you're going by it even 15 miles an hour.
You wouldn't think it, but at least the part of LA that I live in is like
very richly textured walking wise if you care to walk.
There's a lot of nature.
There's a lot of like little hidden paths, hidden stairs where I live.
And that's like so magical and you would never know if all you did was drive
at a high speed versus taking the time to be in the world.
And I've become such an advocate of being in the world,
especially when it feels like there's at least a subset of people who have never been
more online, more invested in online and what's everyone saying online.
And I guess this is in so many words, just a touch grass sort of campaign,
but it's so real.
Like as somebody who really spent a lot of time online, built their career online.
I'm like, I think if somebody was like, come on, come for like just get in the car,
I'd be like, I need for my brain to like be subsumed to the extent that
whatever happens between here and where we're going constitutes like a forest bath type of thing.
Like my brain needs that.
I mean, I had this happen to me when, so I'm pregnant again currently,
but my last pregnancy right around this time actually, I biked to meet some friends at a brewery,
I had a non-alcoholic fear and was going to bike home.
I think it was dark by this point, but my two friends were like, please don't bike.
We'll do anything to get you to not bike.
We'll put your bike in our car.
We live so close.
They were like, you don't need to bike.
And I was like, I'm going to bike.
Now it's a thing.
Now you made it a thing and I'm going to bike.
Then we got home, I biked home.
I wasn't really aware of like their cars or where they were, but we got home and
one of them texted and they were like, well, it was a humiliating experience being passed by
Casey over and over on her bike as every time I came to a light and she would just speed by.
I was standing on a street corner recently and I noticed that the guy next to me
was wearing a Cleverhood zipster jacket and I immediately felt a bond with him.
That's not just because Cleverhood skier is my own choice for effective,
convenient rain coverage when I'm biking and walking.
As I can be pretty sure that we both appreciate other things about Cleverhood,
like the fact that they use PFAS free water repellent and fabric made from recycled fiber
and that they support local and national street equity organizations.
You can join the Cleverhood team by going to cleverhood.com slash war on cars and entering
code shower power to get 15% off everything in the Cleverhood store through the end of May.
Cleverhood.com slash war on cars code shower power. Stand together with Cleverhood.
We've been wearing the Lumos Ultra Smart Bike Helmet on our rides around the city lately
and I gotta say this thing is pretty nifty. The Lumos Ultra Smart Bike Helmet features
integrated lights that can be seen from nearly 1500 feet away with 360 degree visibility
for maximum safety in any environment or conditions. It also features turn signals
activated by a handlebar mounted remote. Plus the Lumos Ultra syncs with the Lumos Firefly lights,
the all-in-one smart bike light that acts as both front and rear light with turn signals,
brake lights, synchronized flashing and convenient magnetic mounting which makes
them easy to put on and take off your bike. Oh and the other cool thing about these lights?
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There is a thing you write about in the book about kind of coming out
to your friends as a weightlifter, as someone who lifts weights and I think it's something
that Sarah especially brings up when we're at our book events of like there's been this
progression in our lives where we no longer have to sort of mutter under our breath of like
oh I cover transportation like we actually can come out now and say oh we host a podcast called
The War on Cars we wrote a book called Life After Cars like we talk about why cars are bad but when
we both started there was this sort of hesitancy to say oh you know I do a lot of advocacy to like
deprioritize cars and planning and that kind of stuff and you experience and you talk about in
your book that moment when you came out to your friends as like oh I've been lifting weights
what was the reaction like to your friends because it did cut into these cultural expectations
especially as a woman outing yourself to a lot of male friends about lifting weights.
This is like characteristic of me which is that I did it for a while without telling anyone what
I was doing I just wanted to try it and see like what will happen to me personally well will I have
the experience of the person I saw online will it be completely different will I hate it but I
was compelled by now I'm recalling you know she said she was lifting for like 30 minutes three times
a week she was having a great time she wasn't doing other exercise and I was like I run so
much like way more than that but I just had this sense that people would be coming down on me with
all my own preconceived notions of like oh you want to like be a bodybuilder now and like all this
stuff and I wasn't prepared to bear those that commentary I guess but so what happened was
my memorable experience of it was going being at a party at one point and it coming up sort of
innocuously in conversation that someone was like oh what are you doing and I was like oh
I started lifting weights a few months ago and the first thing everyone asks you to do is to make
a muscle with your arm and then to squeeze it and then make their assessment of like whether
you've gotten stronger or not and then men always want to arm wrestle you and that was
what happened with this party that was repeated many times men just always want to arm wrestle you
when they find out you lift weights so I had three different guys be like me me me I want to try I
want arm wrestle her and I just be all three of them which is has almost nothing to do with
being some kind of like crazy strong or crazy talented at arm wrestling but just that someone
who has a basic amount of like training and strength practice is kind of always going to be
stronger than someone who doesn't work out at all which I don't think these guys really did
but guys are used to being good at arm wrestling because from their like high school sports days
or whatever but yeah that was the moment and it was kind of like fun and like kind of the best
possible outcome of ending up telling people about something that I didn't really plan on
declaring myself as such a person going into that night I wanted to hit on something else
Sarah that you said you said that in turning down that ride or trying to that there was this
instinct that you had to be polite yeah you know that you couldn't challenge it as directly maybe
as you might have wanted and Casey you write in the book about going to a gym called Richies in
Brooklyn basically I think being the only woman there you know and having to deal with that idea
of like what do I do when inevitably I'm going to get a lot of unsolicited and possibly incorrect
advice from men and you write about like this guy Demetrios I believe who is like kind of well
meaning it seems but in that clueless dude way of like I'm gonna go tell this woman I'm just
trying to be nice sort of thing and you having to kind of eat that instinct out of a feeling of
safety perhaps of like I can't piss this guy off too much and tell him hey I'm just here to
work out on my own thanks but no thanks you know in the cycling world let's say women have to deal
with that all the time you know do you have the right gear and it's like I'm just trying to get
to work like I just want to get to where I'm going and I'll figure it out on my own there and
there are plenty of resources available to me should I seek them out I don't need you right now
telling me what to do could you talk about that experience I was definitely really
intimidated by the idea of someone who probably did literally know more than me like put aside the
guys who are just Jim bros who don't know what they're talking about I was like I don't have the
index to know whether someone knows what they're talking about because I'm so new to this and I
don't want to get sort of bowled over by somebody coming up and talking to me and saying like you
should do this this this so that was scary for me to go into a place where I didn't feel like the
expert but there were some of those guys there were a couple of guys where they perceived me doing a
deadlift wrong or they thought I was trying to do something that I wasn't actually trying to do and
they would come up and be like you should do it like this like hold it like this and stand like
this and I would just be like okay like I think kind of grit my way through the interaction or
sort of cringe and be unfriendly and they would take the hint and while those things did happen
they ended up not being like the defining aspect of how this all went they were as present as anyone
is in the world who harasses you which is unfortunate to say but it was not as unrelenting
as I was worried it was going to be and then Demetrios was interesting because I sort of
received him as everyone else of like you're talking to me and I'm not here to be talked to
I had my headphones in I'm just trying to do my workout but he was like trying to be friendly
to me and like offer me a spot which is when someone sort of supervises your lift and prevents
anything from from the weight from falling on you which was kind of him and I think it was
probably obvious that I was very new at what I was doing so he was trying to sort of like welcome me
in and I wasn't very receptive to it but he just sort of kept like you know offering me that help
and being friendly to me who is unfriendly which is so brave I feel like in retrospect to continue
to solicit somebody who is kind of like standoffish the way that I can be and I ended up really
appreciating him because he he was trying to I think help me feel comfortable and that was
ultimately kind of nice of him and I found that there were more people who were interested in
clearing a path for me than there were people who were trying to like come over and lecture me about
how I was doing everything wrong the ratio is off the charts mostly people were interested in sharing
the equipment sharing their experience eager to see somebody or they could tell that I was new
to help them get into it not only were there those people but there were plenty of people who
I sort of learned later did notice me and did notice that I probably seemed like I didn't
really know what I was doing out of place but they had sort of left me alone too and that was
also a beautiful realization that some people had just sort of trusted me to have my own experience
of this overall I felt like the the gym community met me where I was at for the most part and was
really nice and I was not expecting that I was expecting a lot more hostility again on the
basis of like narratives out there and based on my judgments of looking into the gym and being
like wow those are a lot of like really sweaty really huge guys that are all screaming at each other
and then the reality was they scream at each other but like that's fun for them they're not
gonna scream at me and screaming is not their like only mode of communicating with people
so yeah it ended up being overall much more positive than I was expecting yeah I I love
that anecdote in the book because as much as I'm sort of talking about the guys who scream like
your seat's too low and we'll talk to you about gear ratios and you know burn your ear off talking
about such things like if you really start to get involved in let's say the cycling community
you'll find there are many more people who are just like hey I'm kind of here if you
need a resource like welcome like yeah you do your own thing but if you ever have a question
there are a million people who are willing to help you out and it's it's kind of like the
bro culture takes up so much oxygen it can obscure the well-meaning and nice people who just want
to help and who aren't there to lecture you or like brag about how much they know right the
seats too low people are present but they're present everywhere in the world and they are
assholes like that's that's like the right way to think of them like you're not wrong for finding
that behavior and you kind of have to hold on to your experience of that as well this is a
peril of living in real life as you say so we can protect ourselves from all of those things by
not going outside and by not picking things up and by not exerting ourselves to move through
space right so you know that's the fear can keep people away from those things and protect them
from those things but then it also prevents them from having all these wonderful experiences that
they could have and so if women are trying to move through the world in a way that is
in any way counter to the you know prevailing narrative or the the status quo you know we're
always going to run up against these obstacles right and so we do have to kind of get tough about
that and then I think when one does get more expertise and I certainly feel this way about
bicycles because I've been doing that for a long time that I kind of can
just let it flow off my back a little bit more easily or I can actually just say no this actually
happened to me not long ago I had borrowed a bicycle and the brake was rubbing on the rim
and the person riding next to me heard it and thought that I didn't know it was happening
and I did know it was happening and I was waiting until we got to a stopping point to
do something about it which I also knew how to do but because I did feel confident and strong
in myself I was able to not get defensive about it you know I think that is another thing that when
you build yourself up whether it be your your muscles whether it be your cardio whether it be
your knowledge about bicycles or whatever it is that if you've taken the time to build yourself
up then that does allow you to be in a position of strength so you get less defensive when these
things come at you and they do seem more minor because you're so big and strong that you know
it's like it's not really that scary if somebody questions you you know I know you've written a
book you've written two books in this newsletter you're constantly trying to communicate these
ideas to other people I think especially other women and so I'm just interested in sort of the
feedback that you get from your readers about the example that you're setting because we often
say you know people say oh how can I get more people to ride transit in my city or how can I get
more people to ride bikes in my city and I always say one of the best ways is to be a buddy for
somebody to say I'll ride the bus with you I'll ride a bike with you but you're sort of doing that
in a in a larger sense with with lifting and physical strength so maybe you could talk a
little bit about how you're modeling and how you're kind of a workout buddy for people and
some of the feedback that you've gotten about that I think when I was younger I had this sense that
and I write about this in the book that if only I can sort of follow all the rules and make them
all make sense and do them enough like I'm going to be okay I will reach a point where I can stop
worrying about all of this so much hopefully I will get to a point where it won't feel so hard
and then I think what you realize maybe only with the benefit of experience
is that you can't make everyone happy I think women get undue pressure to try and satisfy everyone
but the whole thing about it is that it is impossible you cannot thread all of the needles
and make everyone happy you just can't do it I would have heard that and been like well I'm
going to be the first one to thread all the needles and then I end up disappointed but it's
like if I could make anyone hear anything it would be something along those lines I hear
from so many people where they're so worried of like putting a toe out of line like doing one
thing wrong it's like how do I do this and remain unassailable like no one will ever have to say
anything to me because my break will never be rubbing on the rim sort of thing yeah you will
do something that will prompt somebody to say something but then you find out I think the
more you have these interactions and you allow yourself to be this imperfect person out there
that it's okay to say yeah I know it sucks when it rubs on the rim I'm going to fix it bye bye
you know like we can all only sort of work through that fear through the practice of
doing these things that ends up being the gist of a lot of my reassurance to people out there
which is like I sense that you want to do this perfectly and you can remain an unassailable
person if you never try like no one can ever assail you about how you're lifting wrong or
biking wrong if you never do it because you will do it wrong if you do it you just will
and that's a scary thought you don't have to kind of take on all of the mistakes that you're ever
going to make before you ever do them you're only going to have one first time at the gym
and every time after that will feel easier because you've been through it once and then like you're
building up your tolerance for everything about this from dealing with people but also making
room for yourself to be imperfect at something and that is okay that's one of the things I really
enjoyed about there's a certain part of the book where you write about you know if you're running
and you have a bad run of let's say four miles and you're running 25 30 miles a week it's like
well tomorrow you're going to run another four miles but with weightlifting you talk about how
your reps especially when you're starting are really limited it's like five reps of this
five reps of that one other thing and then you're done and so if you do three of those
five reps quote unquote incorrectly your form's not right or whatever it's like that's it you
don't get to experiment until two or three days later again you have to kind of force yourself
to be okay with that imperfection which i think is a really valuable lesson for life that really
shines through in the book one of the other things that kind of connected with me diet culture is
always about sacrifice you talked about limiting yourself to 1200 calories you know per day you
would go for a run and then not feel this license to eat what you wanted to afterwards because you
would be kind of undoing the run in a way but with weightlifting you write about the importance of
eating and rest and in fact spending time not lifting and also the repair to your body after
you lift because that is sort of what you're doing you're kind of like breaking your muscles to
build them back up again you know i think it's a point that we make a lot in our advocacy is that
so many of the solutions so let's say climate change are about sacrifice don't eat meat don't
fly but the stuff that we're advocating for is additive to your life like oh you get more time
in your life more money in your pocket more time with your family or whatever it is if you bike
instead of drive or as you were talking about more direct engagement with your community
and your environment if you walk instead of accept the ride from the friend and so that to me really
there was this crossover of like oh we can kind of have it all but it takes a mind shift change of
like i can reclaim my notion of sacrifice of time again i'm always looking for these connections
and it was right there i felt in the book of like think of what i'm gaining by shifting my mind away
from every day i have to do this thing i have to be productive in fact actually the not doing the
thing is part of what goes into doing the thing if that makes sense yeah i mean i think it ties into
so many people think of exercise as a punishment which i think there's a lot of reasons that that's
kind of valid like in in our ecosystem of how we usually think about this stuff that like
that is kind of how it's framed up like it's like no pain no gain like sweat is your fat crying
sort of rhetoric people think of walking as a punishment it's like good and a relief to drive
but it sucks to walk that feels like a abstract and disconnected conception
of walking or you're not allowing walking to put forth its own merits a lot of this is narrative
that we've sort of received versus trying to have our own experience of these things or
reconnect to the experience that has been there for a really really long time before cars existed
and before gyms existed that like people have enjoyed physical activity for a really long time
i find biking literally enjoyable to feel versus being in a car but it was something that i really
felt for the first time with lifting this idea that there were all of these pieces coming together
within exercise that had nothing to do with the obligation of performing being the person had
everything to do with what it felt like to be in my body i think that's a really good place to end
it because you speak so well to just claiming your physical experience for yourself and that's
what we're all about here on the war on cars is being able to make choices about moving our bodies
and how we are in the world and yeah what you talked about is really relatable so i thank you so
much for being here today kasey thank you for having me thank you for your nice words i'm such a
fan this is such an honor to have been here i'm so glad we could make this happen i've been a big
fan for a long time thank you yeah me too that's it for this episode you can subscribe to kasey
johnson's newsletter she's a beast by going to she's a beast dot co you can also pick up her book
a physical education how i escaped diet culture and gain the power of lifting wherever you get
including at our official shop at bookshop.org we'll put links to all things kasey johnson
in the show notes remember you can support us and get exclusive bonus content pre-sale access
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nathaniel good year transcripts are by russell gragg our logo is by danie finkel i'm sarah good
year i'm doug gordon and this is the war on cars
About this episode
Casey Johnston and the hosts connect diet culture, exercise psychology, and body-image pressure to the “war on cars.” They argue that telling people to “just work out more” ignores how car-dependent infrastructure limits equitable access to walking, cycling, and transit. Johnston shares how lifting reframed her relationship to her body and livelihood, and how unlearning stereotypes often starts with community—like learning from a Reddit thread. The conversation also loops through e-bike and bike-gear sponsorships.
Original notes
Just as it is with road safety, so much of how Americans talk about health pushes the responsibility for eating right and exercising onto the individual, ignoring the many structural barriers that prevent people from making "good" choices. Through her newsletter, She's a Beast, and her bestselling book A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting, Casey Johnston cuts through the noise, making connections across various disciplines to help people rethink their notions about health, exercise and body positivity. Casey joins The War on Cars to talk about how "at the scale of daily life, cars should be systematically discouraged, in order to even begin to contend with the deaths and health decline from a lack of physical activity."
***Support The War on Cars on Patreon and receive exclusive access to ad-free versions of regular episodes, Patreon-only bonus content, Discord access, invitations to live events, merch discounts and free stickers!***
Order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, out now from Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Find out the latest about our book tour at LifeAfterCars.com.
LINKS:
Buy Casey Johnston's books, A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting and Liftoff: Couch to Barbell, as well as books by all of our podcast guests at our official page on Bookshop.org
Subscribe to Casey Johnston's newsletter, She's a Beast, and read her post on "the plot to strangle the American of life, liberty, and happiness."
Thanks to Cleverhood for sponsoring The War on Cars. Listen for the latest discount code and get the best rain gear for walking and cycling at 15% off.
Buy a certified, pre-owned e-bike from Upway and save $100 off any purchase of $800 or more with code TWOC100. Visit Upway.co to get rolling.
Check out the Lumos Ultra Smart bike helmet and the Firefly smart light system at RideLumos.com
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