The wonder of weightlifting | Jaime Seeman (re-release)

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Growing up obstetrician and gynecologist, Jaime Seeman loved sports, but she couldn't help comparing herself to the images of beauty she saw everywhere, feeling like she never quite measured up. This was before influencers and filters when the standard came from magazine covers.

Jaime Seeman (0:26)

Those Cosmo cover girls, well, they didn't have a lot of muscles. Frankly, they looked kind of frail, somewhat unhealthy.

But to the world, they were beautiful and they were idolized. And as a young girl, I let that frame the way that I looked and thought about myself.

Elise Hu (0:44)

That pressure to look a certain way doesn't just shape how we see our bodies, it shapes how we care for them. In this talk, Jaime, for whom weightlifting is a passion, takes on the myths that keep women out of the weight room. Through her own life and her work with patients, she's found something genuinely alarming. That strength training, one of the most powerful things any of us can do for our health, is still something a lot of women are told isn't for them.

Jaime Seeman (1:08)

You've seen it when you walk into the gym, this big room of treadmills, ellipticals, and stair climbers filled with women. But in the Journal of Exercise Science, they found for every woman that was using the free weight section of the gym, there was 27 men.

Elise Hu (1:25)

Jaime makes the case that building muscle isn't about how you look, it's about health, and in some cases, it can quite literally be the difference between life and death. It's all coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the Day.

Jaime Seeman (1:48)

As a little girl, I loved playing sports. I also loved painting my fingernails and parading around my mother's house in her high-heeled shoes. From the beginning of time, I have lived in contrasting worlds, contrasting and often conflicting ideas about what women should and shouldn't do, or maybe how we should and shouldn't look. A pivotal moment came for me when I was a sophomore in high school. My mother took me to an audition for a modeling agency. And I can't tell you how nervous I was that day or even what I was wearing, but I will never forget the way I felt the next morning. As I was walking into school, I got a phone call. They wanted to sign me as a plus size model. I was a size 10, by the way. If I could go back and talk to that 16-year-old version of myself, I would tell her exactly what my own mother told me that day. You were built for bigger and better things. So I turned down their offer, and I went on to play NCAA college softball, where I was a weightlifter of the year twice. I loved being in the gym, and I loved throwing those heavy weights around. But what I really loved the most was the confidence that my physical strength instilled in me.

But there was always this nagging feeling, this sort of whisper in the back of my mind. And it sounded a lot like the voice on the phone that day, telling me that I was different, somehow not ideal, because I would shrink inside every time somebody commented on my muscular body.

You see at the time, the only social media we had was something called Cosmopolitan Magazine.

And those Cosmo cover girls, well, they didn't have a lot of muscles. Frankly, they looked kind of frail, somewhat unhealthy. But to the world, they were beautiful and they were idolized. And as a young girl, I let that frame the way that I looked and thought about myself. And this is the problem. Even though something like weightlifting has a multitude of proven health benefits, there continues to be a stigma for women based on cultural and societal myths about what women should and shouldn't do. I believe that if we can create a new culture that shifts the focus from aesthetics to health, that women's health, and frankly, everybody's health, could be transformed forever.

Now, I'd like to be able to tell you that after college, I continued to train really hard in the gym, ate a perfect diet amidst a family and children and a stressful career. But that is not what happened. What really happened is I went to medical school, I survived residency, I got married and had three children, and I woke up one day dealing with the same metabolic diseases that I was helping my own patients manage through medication. I could see it, I could feel it, but I told myself that I would just take care of it when I had more time. And so many of us let ourselves believe that we have a lot of time. Now, according to the CDC, the top three killers of women is heart disease, cancer, and stroke. The major contributing factor to these causes of death is what I call metabolic disease. And even though our modern, high-fat, high-carbohydrate, highly-processed diets play a major role. There's one thing that women are not doing across their lifespan that could tremendously reduce their risk of death. And that is building muscle. The data is actually very clear when it comes to resistance training. So why aren't more women doing it?