Up until a few months ago, I never felt very strong. I was a fat kid who grew into a fat teenager, and now I’m a fat adult. For most of my youth in recreational league sports, I was usually the tallest, fattest kid on the team, which in softball meant I was relegated to the position of catcher and in basketball meant I was a shooting guard every year because I was usually slower than everyone else. I played soccer, but being slow is basically a criminal offense in the sport so my parents let me try other things after a couple of seasons. As I got older, the possibility of participating in sports became much more difficult. There’s no recreational leagues for older kids because they turn into actual leagues and travel leagues, and there was no way I was ever going to make the cut at the elite sports program in my high school. To be completely honest, when that time came around, I wasn’t sad about it at all because, at that point, having to play sports was wrapped up in my family’s anti-fatness. It was a way of guaranteeing I was getting some kind of traditional exercise — for whatever reason, spending every minute I could outside of the house with my little brother and our friends didn’t count as “activity” — and I could feel that in the way they didn’t really ask whether or not I wanted to play.

Of course, I was always a great teammate because I was a social kid who was afraid to let people down. I pushed myself hard. In practice, I was rarely ever the first person to sit down for a rest. During game play, I didn’t let anything, not even injuries to my body, get in the way of finishing with everyone else. At the same time, my mom was already indoctrinating me into the cult of diet and wellness culture. And as I was with anything that was designed to “make me better,” I was a diligent student and tried my best to succeed in whatever the task was at hand. In the four years after she started me on fad diets when I was nine, we tried everything from Weight Watchers to the cabbage soup diet to the South Beach Diet (a favorite of hers since the guy who invented it actually worked in Miami Beach, near where we lived). All of it was about restricting food intake and maximizing energy output. The less you eat, the more you do with your body, the more weight you’ll lose. Knowing what I know about how bodies work now, it feels crazy that anyone believed this. But in the 90s, this idea was pervasive, and no one was challenging it in a very public way. By the time high school started, my body was in pain most of the time, and the fatigue I experienced even impacted how I was doing in my classes. Something had to give.

After freshman year, my mom’s alcoholism made it nearly impossible for her to control and monitor my diet and exercise habits, so I never repaired my relationship with intentional movement. We just kind of dropped off on all of it, and in my mind, working out in any capacity remained connected to the web of diet culture tenets I was forced to engage in for a significant chunk of my childhood. Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t the last time I’d get wrapped up in diet culture nonsense. In my early twenties, I tried again to lose weight through a restrictive diet and high intensity exercise and ended up losing over 100 pounds, but it still went the way it always does. Sure, the weight loss made a lot of everyday activities easier to do, but I never felt well. Again, I was just in a lot of pain and tired all the time. And again, I didn’t spend any time trying to untangle the web I mentioned before. I just did the things I thought I “needed” to do and then looked for the results of those things. I taught myself, once again, that intentional movement wasn’t sustainable, and I dropped off.

***One of the biggest infractions you can commit as a person is to defy our societal standards of size and beauty, so we have a particular idea of what it means to become “better” physically. We’re not told to eat well or to exercise just because we’re living, breathing things who need to eat nutritious foods and move our bodies so we don’t experience long term harm as a result of inactivity. We’re told that eating well and exercising will keep us at a “healthy” size and will extend the lengths of our lives. We’re mired in anti-fatness from our childhood on. In the 90s and early 2000s, the jokes in a lot of media — from TV to films to comics — were most often on the fattest character in the cast. Fat kids shopped in the husky and junior plus sections because we couldn’t just keep all the sizes together in one spot. We were simultaneously encouraged to do physical activity by the adults in our lives and discouraged from doing it because no one told the other kids involved that fat kids are human beings, too. “Fat” celebrities, the women especially, were torn apart in the tabloids and on tabloid news shows. Films like The Nutty Professor and Bridget Jones’s Diary were around to remind us all that the key to love was being thin.

More often than not, “better” means thinner, and thinner means more beautiful. We’re more likely to see someone praise another person for their ability to remain a size 4 for their whole life than we are to see someone shower that person with praise for being able to complete a half marathon just a year after they failed at completing a 5K. In fact, most people wouldn’t really think of that as the incredible win that it is. Instead, they’d focus on the aesthetic benefits of training for something like that by telling the person they’ve never looked better or by asking what kind of exercise and diet regimen keeps them looking so trim. Our conception of what “better” means has nothing to do with the amount of discipline and hard work it would take to reach a strength goal. In turn, we approach everything related to physical strength and ability this way. It’s never about the person’s actual capabilities or how they’ve been able to transform those capabilities over time. It’s about their pants size or the amount of muscle mass we can see through their shirts or, particularly for women, it’s about being that one particular shape deemed most worthy of affection in our society.

Due to my relationship with diet and exercise culture, I thought about most people’s relationships with exercise this way for a long time, too. I was convinced that everyone was just doing it because they had been pilled at some point to believe that the worst thing they could ever be was fat, so they were doing everything in their power to avoid it or reverse it. And much of the anti-fatness that still swirls around us constantly didn’t help dispel that for me.

***About a year and a half into the pandemic, I started having pain in my left knee. It seemingly came out of nowhere, but I think I had warning signs at some point that I can’t clearly remember. The regular movements of my ordinary, everyday life had gotten more and more difficult as the months went on and the knee pain got worse. At some points, even walking short distances was a challenge, and even though it felt a little bit alarmist (and anti-fat) at the time, I was worried that my orthopedic doctor was right when he said that without some lifestyle changes, I might lose my mobility in that knee some day due to the osteoarthritis that was causing the pain. In the mornings, the dull ache of someone squeezing and pulling apart that joint at the same time was the first thing I felt. And sometimes, even sleep was a challenge because there isn’t a single position you can get into on a mattress where your knees are not impacted in some way. Similar to how I acted as a young person, I pretended it wasn’t as bad as it was for many months. I did my best to keep up with my friends when they walked too fast for me, and no matter how badly it hurt, I just did what everyone else was doing. Often, this would lead to more pain and more aggravation, but I wasn’t ready to accept the alternative: actually doing something about it.

By July 2022, it became unbearable. I couldn’t imagine working another entire school year with the pain I was experiencing. I spent a couple of weeks researching what I could do, and every single result — from write ups on blogs to actual scientific studies — said the exact same thing: I had to start doing some regular intentional movement to get blood flowing properly through the joint and to make the muscles around my knee stronger so they can better support my knee when it’s weak. As I read, I realized that, essentially, I would have to sacrifice what little free time I have (and what little money I have) in order to train at the gym, and I’d have to put myself in more physical pain in order to try to improve the mobility of my knee. I knew from my good friend who participates regularly in strongman and powerlifting competitions regardless of problems he’s encountered with his own knees that his strength coach was good at helping people with injuries and joint problems, so I asked for his number. I sat on that phone number for another two weeks before finally texting him. In mid-August, I finally got there.

When I first started working out at the strength gym, I just thought it was going to be something I did because I wanted to improve the health and longevity of my knee. But something switched on inside of me after the first month. Through the people at the gym, my coach, and the good friend I mentioned before, I started to learn about the culture of strength sports, and I started to learn what many of the people who participate in strength sports actually look like. Perhaps most importantly, I started to learn about the discipline, practice, and pain it takes to become as strong as they are.

The thing I learned over a couple of months of being there is that, actually, fat people are a lot stronger than everyone thinks. Our mobility is often impacted by our size, and we move differently than people who are thin, but our movements take more energy which means even if we get tired quicker, it’s sometimes easier for us to build muscle mass. Building muscle mass, ultimately, is what makes you stronger. Simply doing things like sitting down and getting up is similar to doing a bodyweight squat. Carrying your body around all day as you move from place to place impacts the strength of your muscles in your calves and in your quads.

***When you Google the strongest men and women (unfortunately, they are divided into binary categories) in the world, you’ll see some of the chiseled, hard body physiques you probably expect to see. But more than that, you’ll see fat people absolutely sweeping strength competitions everywhere from local ones in my backyard here in South Florida to the Olympics (literally). You’ll see Eddie Hall, Lasha Talakhadze, Tom Stoltman, Žydrūnas Savickas, Mark Henry, Li Wenwen, Sarah Robles, Tatiana Kashirina, Alirene Clair, and Cheryl Haworth — all people who are at the top of their classes strength-wise and yet are probably just as scared of sitting in those cheap, plastic white garden chairs (you know the ones) as I am. I’ve spent the last couple of months watching these people move their fat bodies in the most incredible ways. I’ve read and watched interviews with them talking about training to get where they currently are and discussing some of the stigmas they’ve faced in the sports world and the outside world. I’ve been on their Instagram pages, learning from them and watching them do things I’ve been taught my whole life to believe was unattainable by people who look like them and like me.

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Outside of the context of a gym or a strength competition, I could see that these people face the same stigmas, same lack of comfortable seating on airplanes, same anti-fatness in the media, same medical fatphobia, same jabs about what they choose to eat or not, same stares by people in public, same comments on their health and fitness levels as the rest of us even though they’re all athletes. Their success goes against everything we’re taught to know and believe is true about the people around us: that you have to look a certain way and fall into a specific weight class to be physically fit and powerful, that you have to want to work out in order to fit our specific criteria of aesthetic excellence, that your goals for being “better” have to be tangled up in diet and wellness culture, that your health is determined by the size that you are. They defy every single one of these standards just by doing what they do. And they didn’t let anti-fatness and fatphobia keep them from doing it. They kept showing up to the gym to improve their strength. They kept showing up for themselves and for their goals. They’re some of the strongest people in the world, and no one can take that away from them.

Learning from these people has helped me reorient my own sense of what being physically “better” really means. “Better” has nothing to do with our societal conception of it. “Better” has nothing to do with fad diets and wellness trends and doing HIIT (high intensity interval training) exercises that make you fucking miserable. “Better” isn’t conforming to the beauty standards set by our society long before we were born. “Better” isn’t hating our bodies until we “fix” them. In the strength world, “better” is often defined by how hard you work to increase the amount of weight on the barbell. And “better” isn’t necessarily a place you get to, but the path you’re traveling on to get there all the time.

***When I got to the gym originally, I felt like I was the weakest I’d ever been. But week after week after week, I proved to myself that I could handle whatever my coach threw at me, even if it took me longer than a lot of other people to do it. It was hard. It’s still hard. Actually, some hours I spend in the gym are some of the hardest, most physically demanding hours of my life. But I show up every Tuesday and Thursday to see my coach, and I go every Monday and Friday to work my program. Some days, it takes me an hour to get through everything. Other days, it takes me an hour and 45 minutes. I can never fully tell what it’s going to be, but I show up anyway, and I don’t skip out on anything. I can see now that I’ve always been strong and that the strength I had — physically, mentally, and emotionally — has helped me start liking what I’m doing and keeps me showing up for myself even when it’s the most difficult thing to do in a day.

Because I believed for so long that peak performance had to look or be a specific way, I didn’t really think I’d ever be able to exercise and heal my relationship with intentional movement. I’ve known for a long time that losing weight wasn’t going to make me “better” but I never thought I could be better in a way that wasn’t completely caught up in the web of lies I’ve been raised to believe are true. But there is a sports world outside of diet, wellness, and weight loss culture that I can be part of. A world where I can set my intentions as being “strong as fuck” and “able to fist fight politicians and win” and find movements I can do to help me get there and find people who are down to support me in that without wondering what else I’m doing “for my health.” A world where I can increase the weight on certain lifts by 5 to 10 pounds every two weeks because I’ve put in the time and dedication to be able to do that. A world where, with just a little perseverance, I can go from benching 55 pounds and squatting 45 pounds to benching 95 pounds and squatting 85 pounds in a matter of a few months. The new calluses on my hands remind me that the temporary pain I feel in my body now is a testament to my growth and a result of stepping up to take care of the place that will house me for the rest of my life.