Counting calories or lifting weights? Women could be trading one narrow body ideal for another - CNN

Oona Hanson is a writer, educator and parent coach who specializes in helping families navigate diet culture and eating disorders.

Like the rest of my Gen X peers, I grew up with the message that striving for the “Buns of Steel” body was about how you looked in a leotard, not how much weight you could squat in the gym. Women were actively discouraged from strength training for fear of becoming bulky.

For women, cardio has been king — or should we say queen? — for decades, but new awareness of the health benefits of building muscle, particularly for those in middle age, has led more women to start lifting weights. Strength training can be important to protect bone density and overall well-being as we get older.

Even modest strength training can counter age-related decline

New pressure to lift heavy and count protein grams to build muscle mass can lead to another problem for some women, however: an unhealthy preoccupation with exercise and food and yet another aspirational appearance standard.

Women need to know how to care for their bodies without falling prey to unrealistic expectations that can undermine their well-being.

Liz Bucar, a professor of religion at Northeastern University in Boston, used to experience fitness through a cardio-only lens, “always trying to be smaller.”

In midlife now, “we’re all being told, actually, oops, all that advice was terrible,” said Bucar, author of “ Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us.” “Your bones are disintegrating because you didn’t have your period because you were just on the stair machine for hours a day.”

The power of strength training

Bucar, who now strength trains with a coach, described this shift from counting calories to progressing in the weight room as powerful because it is “more protective of our health” and “pushes back against conventional beauty norms.”

“I love the idea that we’re creating this whole generation of grandmas who can’t knit and bake or whatever but are the first in our line of ancestors who can lift our husbands over our heads,” Bucar said.

“For so many of us, exercise was this very toxic thing when it came to our bodies and our mindset, and how it was entwined with diet culture,” Jamison told me. “Taking care of yourself through fitness feels like inarguably a good thing to do. It’s women taking up space.”

Even though Jamison credits strength training as a critical part of her own eating disorder recovery, she still has concerns about the framing of this fitness trend. “‘Strong is the new skinny’ should be like a Bat-Signal to somebody like me, right? Like, oh, that sounds so great. But I think it’s also very complicated,” she said.

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The idealized female image is still thin

Even though women of all sizes are trying to build strength, the images on social media suggest “it’s all about strong and skinny. It’s just another body standard that can be very damaging,” Jamison said.

“More women are strength training than ever before in America. The benefits of that can’t be overstated,” she said. “But at the same time, the face of that message is often women who are still objectively small, just with some additional obvious musculature.”

Keri Harvey, a certified personal trainer and co-owner of Form Fitness Brooklyn in New York, agreed that larger women who lift weights are underrepresented in our culture.

“You’re seeing people in smaller bodies who have muscles, and they are strong, and that’s amazing,” Harvey said. “And yet there are people in larger bodies who are strong as well, and their bodies also have cellulite. Their bodies also have fat. And it may not look like the person that you’re seeing on Instagram or the magazine cover, but that is still a strong body.”

Getting stronger often means getting bigger

Building strength is often literally at odds with shrinking the body.

“I like to tell people to remember that muscles need room,” Harvey said. “Our lats, as they get stronger, it may mean we have to go up in a bra size. Or as your biceps get stronger, it might mean your shirt that you were expecting to fit more loosely might be a bit more snug.”

Harvey encouraged women “to be comfortable with the idea that your body is going to change as you get stronger, but it may not change in the way that you think it should and that’s not a bad thing. It’s tough because a lot of us have been taught that we have to be small.”