Strength training can be a powerful tool to undermine an eating disorder

Thoughts on becoming a strong woman

Strength training can be a powerful tool to undermine an eating disorder for one very simple reason:

You have to eat to lift heavy / You can’t lift heavy if you don’t eat.

Plus, performing an act of strength is not pretty. It’s not polite. It goes against each cardinal rule of patriarchal femininity. So for women who have been trained since birth to shrink themselves and apologize, the whole process amounts to defiance.

I competed in my first CrossFit competition over the weekend and watched the strongest women I had ever seen move through a bar like water. They didn’t ask for permission. They didn’t apologize when they dropped it and it made a loud noise and everyone remembered how heavy that thing was. They made it look easy.

And I have no idea how these women felt. But I know how I felt watching them. I felt like it was something every woman on earth should see. I felt like they were breaking chains off me just by existing.

Moving in the same space as them forced me to grieve all the years I spent starving myself, selling off the innate power I had because I felt like I wasn’t allowed to have it.

It made me wonder how differently I might have felt about my body and personality if I had been around women like this earlier in my life. These women who clearly eat. Who hold onto the power they have, develop it, and use it.

I can’t take back time, and wouldn’t want to. But I can spend the rest of my life reminding myself and every woman I meet that strength—loud, ugly, messy, inconvenient strength—is both our responsibility and our birthright.