I spent years trying to get smaller. Until I decided to get bigger

I had been casually lifting weights for a few years when several things changed in quick succession.

First, my boyfriend proposed.

This wasn’t a surprise – he had already told me he wanted to get married, and I had told him exactly how I wanted him to propose: somewhere public but not crowded, not in a restaurant. Since I spend most of my waking hours hunched over my computer looking like an extra from The Walking Dead, I also wanted to be nicely dressed for the occasion.

He gamely followed instructions and got down on one knee in a quiet gallery of my favorite museum. My cute outfit – an orange wrap dress coupled with dainty purple heels – was only slightly undermined by the fact I cried so hard that my eyes puffed up and snot dripped from my nose.

Then came the unexpected part. Planning our wedding sent me into a body-loathing spiral I hadn’t experienced since middle school.

After years of not stepping on a scale, I started weighing myself every morning. I tracked calories and counted steps. I ate as little as possible, and when I couldn’t take it any more, I binged until my stomach ached. Part of me knew I had crossed into unhealthy territory, but I was determined to keep trying to lose weight. When my fiance gently expressed concern, I listened, nodded, then ignored him and continued to unravel.

It took me a while to figure out what had prompted this change of behavior. I thought my crash diet days were behind me, and I didn’t care that much about weddings. Ours was always going to be lowkey: a small courthouse ceremony followed by two parties at our respective parents’ homes.

Eventually, I realized what was driving it. Without consciously doing so, over the years I had constructed an image of the bride I wanted to be, and that woman was skinny. She was all long, twiggy limbs – think nepo baby supermodel, or a newborn foal. I had internalized a noxious idea: that was the kind of woman who was successful and loved.

Despite – or more likely because of – the emotional and physical turmoil I put it through, my body didn’t change. The only thing that did was how I felt about it. Each day, I liked it a little less.

In a matter of weeks, my body would be captured in hundreds of wedding photos. There I would be, looking exactly like myself – not a supermodel. That felt like a crisis, as if my failure to make myself a certain kind of beautiful would undermine the sanctity and magnitude of the day, and disappoint everyone involved. Never mind that I would never think about other people’s weddings in these ugly, vicious terms. I was my only, and favorite, punching bag.

Then, a month before we said “I do,” my fiance and I moved into a new apartment building with a really nice gym. For years, I had been making do with a set of stackable dumbbells bought during lockdown. I had used them for about an hour, three to four times a week, and aside from vaguely trying to eat enough protein, I didn’t monitor what I ate.

This routine had served me well, but now I had access to heavier weights, barbells, a Smith machine, a functional trainer and big mirrors in which I could check my form. Walking around the gym, I felt like a little country mouse gawping at the bright lights and heavy equipment of the big fitness city.

It was exciting. I wanted to see what I could do! Almost immediately, I lifted heavier than I ever had before – and then even heavier than that.

My bingeing and restricting had not abated, and my workout performance was mixed. Some days, I moved weights like they were nothing. Others, I could barely budge them.

When my wedding day arrived, I didn’t think much about my body. We were married in the courthouse’s basement room with terrible lighting, purple carpet and plastic flowers, and it was perfect. I had a wobble when I saw a picture of myself, where I thought I looked lumpy and ghoulish. But then my husband put his arm around me and smiled, and I felt so happy that I thought I might explode.

On the way out, I saw other brides filing into the courthouse: none of them were nepo baby supermodels, all of them beautiful and perfect.

Afterwards, discouraged and exhausted by the process of trying and failing to shrink, I decided I would take the opposite approach.

Instead of trying to lose weight, I would try to gain weight. I was going to bulk.

In lifting parlance, a “bulk” has two parts. The first is eating in a caloric surplus, or eating more calories than your body burns in a day to maintain its current weight. The second is training with progressive overload, which means gradually increasing the difficulty of your lifts by adding weights or reps, in order to build muscle and get stronger.

Building muscle is hard. It requires carefully adjusting the dials on a range of behaviors. You have to eat enough carbs to fuel your workouts; eat more protein than your body uses in a typical day (the extra protein helps build new muscle); train almost to failure, which means you stop when you cannot complete one more repetition with good form; and practice progressive overload. You should schedule at least one to two rest days a week and get plenty of sleep.

It is technically possible to build muscle without increasing your caloric intake. But it’s much harder, and generally only works for people who are new to lifting or who are returning to training after a long hiatus. These are also known as “newbie gains”. But once their bodies adapt, even newbies will eventually require more calories in order to lift heavier.

“At the end of the day, energy is king,” says Dr John Turkish, director of the orthopedic sports medicine fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona.

It doesn’t matter if you’re prioritizing protein, he says – if you’re not eating enough calories, your body will start cannibalizing its existing muscle for energy, and you will end up losing muscle instead of building it.

Why would anyone go through all this trouble if they’re not a professional bodybuilder? Building and maintaining muscle is essential for health, especially as we age. Strength training has been shown to reduce blood pressure, protect cardiovascular health, improve cognitive function and alleviate symptoms of anxiety and depression. It can also prevent injuries and help adults live independently for longer as they age.

Plus, I truly love lifting. While there is a blunt simplicity to strength training – you pick up something heavy and put it down again – there’s also a beautiful subtlety to it. Tiny, almost invisible adjustments in breath and form can completely change how you move weight. Lifting heavier and with good form required me to develop a physical fluency I didn’t have before. The focus it demanded made my workouts almost meditative. Before each exercise, I tried to empty my mind of everything except what each part of my body needed to do.

And because I am vain – and who isn’t? – growing muscle also promised to help me address a more immediate concern: building shoulders the size of bread loaves, and an ass so big and juicy you can see it from space.

My bulk would last three months – enough time to see changes.

“Three months is enough time for all the pieces [of a bulk] to come together,” says Casey Johnston, author of the health and fitness newsletter She’s a Beast and the book Physical Education. “It’s sort of like a minimum effective length of time.”

For most people, she argues, a month or two is not enough to get dialed into your training and nutrition in a way that will make a meaningful difference.

The first thing I had to do was figure out my daily calorie goal. To establish that, I had to figure out roughly how many calories I was burning daily, then add a few hundred more.

This turned out to be easier said than done. I consulted multiple online calorie calculators which asked me for my age, sex, height, weight and activity level in order to determine my total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). They all gave me widely different answers. This led to about a week of trial and error – I started at the lower end of the caloric spectrum and when I felt famished, gradually upped the amount I was eating until I thought I had hit a rough surplus.

This kind of trial and error is often part of the process, says Turkish. For the average person on the street, he says, the best way to accurately determine your caloric needs is to check your weight, and then use a calorie calculator to track everything you consume and see how your weight fluctuates over the course of weeks. “I do it every day, but you could weigh yourself at the same time every week,” he says. “Then you follow those trends over the course of 12, 15, 18 weeks, and you’ll be good at predicting what your calorie burn versus your calorie surplus is.”

For my own sanity, I would not be weighing myself, and instead employing a more vibes-based approach. I would be tracking calories, though, and at first this worried me. Historically, I had only done it in the punishing, restrictive way so many women are taught. But this time was different. Now, I was trying to make sure I got enough – enough calories, enough protein, enough carbs. It felt indulgent to think of the food I could consume, rather than withhold, to reach a goal.

My routine eating habits were not a good way to meet these nutritional goals. My meals were often glorified snacks buttressed by other, smaller snacks. This often resulted in me having to wolf down a big bowl of yoghurt after dinner to hit my protein. It felt like my high school days, when I started getting ready for bed only to realize I had forgotten to do my homework.

I had to be more intentional, so I started to make my meals meal-sized and had snacks like yoghurt with blueberries instead of a handful of chips gulped down over the kitchen sink.

I imagined this would all feel fun. And often, it did. I ate ice-cream sandwiches most days – heaven! – and in the gym, my weights climbed. I hip thrust an amount well above my body weight. I deadlifted nearly twice as much as I had before.

But as I ate more, I was also plagued by continuous, roiling anxiety. The slimiest voices in my head screamed, telling me I was making a terrible mistake. Again and again, I demanded that my now-husband tell me how hot he finds me. He would tell me that of course he found me hot, and that he admired what I was doing and was proud of me.

To which I’d say: “But also, I’m hot, right?”

In a perfect world, this story would be two sentences: I gained weight in order to build muscle, and I loved it. It was easy and uncomplicated, because I know my body does not determine my worth.

Sadly, that would be a lie.

The reasons for my poor body image are boring and common: the boy in middle school who pointed at my stomach and pretended to vomit; watching hours of The Biggest Loser before my frontal lobe had fully developed; the adult relative who told me, when I was eight, that I should stop eating carbs; reading gossip blogger Perez Hilton every day in 2008 when he called Mischa Barton “Mushy Fartone” because she occasionally had visible cellulite; the college boyfriend who told me that my freshman weight gain put me “at the threshold of attractiveness”.

The idea of gaining weight on purpose felt scary. But it also felt transgressive and liberating. What a relief to step off the sisyphean treadmill of weight loss.

The people around me were overwhelmingly supportive. Several women, committed lifters themselves, told me they had been intrigued by bulking, but were too nervous to try.

“The concept of it challenges most of what [women] are taught about our bodies, and what we are made to fear about our bodies,” says Johnston.

Johnston did her first bulk in 2016. She had been lifting for a couple of years at that point and her strength had plateaued, but she was nervous.

“My fear was that things would spiral out of control,” she says. “What I had always been taught was that if you’re not militantly vigilant about not gaining weight, it happens unpredictably and uncontrollably. The idea of doing it on purpose was completely alien to me.”

Eventually, though, her desire to get stronger became greater than her “mortal fear” of gaining weight.

“The main thing was I couldn’t believe how different I felt at the gym,” she says. Suddenly, she was easily lifting weights she had struggled with before, and she even found herself sweating less during workouts.

Johnston’s bulk lasted about four months, after which she began a “cut”, the common practice of eating in a slight calorie deficit to burn fat and reveal the muscle she had been building. But cutting was “relatively painless” compared with the dieting she had practised before, Johnson explained in a 2022 Instagram post, adding that “no one should suffer at the hand of ‘weight loss’.”

She has bulked and cut several times since, but is careful to underscore that this is not a requirement for lifting weights.

Indeed, you can become the strongest woman in the world without bulking.

“I personally have not done a bulk,” says Tamara Walcott, a coach, powerlifter and world record–holder in multiple lifts. While she regularly programs periods of bulking for her clients, it is not something she does on purpose for herself.

“I am a food addict; I will always be a food addict,” she says. At her heaviest, before she ever picked up a weight, Walcott weighed 455lb. Now, she competes at 275lb. “I pretty much eat the same amount of calories I did when I was 400lb, but I’m more strategic about it and I’m using it as fuel, because I know how it gives me energy.”

Bulking isn’t for everyone, says Riley Nickols, a sports psychologist and member of the clinical advisory committee for the National Eating Disorders Association (Neda). He warns that people with an extensive history of dieting, and especially those currently navigating eating disorders should probably avoid embarking on the process.

“It can be unintentionally activating, and loaded with fear, loss of control, and an identity threat,” he says. “It can activate anxiety, guilt or even shame.”

In order to bulk safely, he says, it’s important to keep an eye out for signs that the practice may be shifting from a healthy way to improve performance into an unhealthy fixation on appearance and numbers. These red flags include increased rigidity about food and exercise, fear of deviating from the food and training plan, preoccupation with food and body-specific numbers, compensatory behaviors like extra cardio or avoiding social situations to avoid deviating from the plan.

He suggests limiting weigh-ins and mirror checking, and prioritizing performance markers instead, such as strength and recovery. “If the plan starts to control the athlete rather than support the athlete, that’s where we get concerned,” Nickols says.

I admitted to Nickols my relationship with food was far from perfect, and I didn’t know if it ever would be. But it also felt important to treat my body in a completely different way than I had in the past. (I also reassured him that I worked with a therapist – one who was a former bodybuilder at that.)

“No one has a perfect relationship with anything, and that’s OK,” he said. “You’re curious, but it’s also challenging you.”

As the weeks went on, I developed a sense of entitlement in the gym. It’s what I imagine it feels like to be a white man asking for a pay raise: confidence that numbers will just keep going up and up. And they did.

Then there was the energy boost. My brain and body hummed along more efficiently. It felt as if I had upgraded from a beat-up 2005 Nissan to a brand new, muscular Toyota Tundra towing a heavy load (my butt).

At night, my body seemed to run warmer – all of its systems chugging along, the little muscle factories busy at work. In pictures, I noticed ever-so-slight hints of shoulder muscles.

My clothes also fit more tightly. I squeezed into previously comfortable jeans, and my growing glutes made a favorite miniskirt indecent for public wear. At times this filled me with despair. But it was also a relief. The very thing I had spent so much time and energy trying to avoid – gaining weight, getting bigger – was happening, and it was fine. My life didn’t change, except that I had more energy and wore more flowing linen pants.

Eventually, something happened that I never thought was possible: eating felt boring. I had never fed myself so consistently and with such care, and now that my body was finally and consistently receiving the fuel and nutrients it needed, it stopped begging me for Nutella and sour cream and onion potato chips. I forgot about the ice-cream sandwiches in the freezer. Occasionally, I groaned when I realized I needed to eat more – a previously unthinkable reaction.

I was happy when the bulk ended (see: tight clothes, food boredom). I stopped tracking my food intake for a while, then went into a slight calorie deficit. Like Johnston had said, it felt very different from any other “diet” I had done in the past. I had to eat enough to maintain the muscle I had built, and I had learned the importance of eating consistently throughout the day, so I rarely felt hungry. The hardest part was not seeing my numbers go up as quickly at the gym. I had gotten spoiled by my own strength.

My jeans are still a little tight, and my shoulders and butt are not quite as juicy as I would like them to be, but they’re a little bigger. And gaining weight does not feel like the scary monster under my bed it once was. It’s a tool that can help me get stronger and do cool things.

The food noise and body anxiety is still there in the background – two tiresome, unwanted guests who don’t know when it’s time to leave the party. But they are quieter now, or at least I don’t pay them as much attention. A scared, ignorant voice telling you that you’ll be happier if you don’t eat is less persuasive when you’ve experienced the delight of getting strong, feeling energized, and having a hint of shoulder muscles. The external pressures are still there, but it feels satisfying to be doing the opposite of what’s expected of me.

Someday, I want to deadlift my own body weight and do pull-ups like the star of an action movie in a training montage. And when that time comes, I will do the calculations, put together a plan and get to work.

The Guardian wp:paragraph