You Might Also Like: Stateside with Kai and Carter

**Madeleine Aggeler** (0:00)
I didn't just decide to commit to weight lifting. I specifically decided to bulk, which is a term in weight lifting, which is where you're eating to gain weight. I think after the months of spiraling about my body, about doing the same thing I had done a hundred times before, I think I was like, I need to do a 180 I need to do something completely different to shake myself out of it.
So not only am I not going to try to lose weight, I'm going to intentionally try to gain weight and try to get bigger and stronger.

**Carter Sherman** (0:43)
From The Guardian, this is Stateside. I'm Carter Sherman.

**Kai Wright** (0:46)
I'm Kai Wright.

**Carter Sherman** (0:47)
Today, I'm going to start with a question. Kai, how strong do you feel?

**Kai Wright** (0:53)
Well, do you have a minute?

**Carter Sherman** (0:56)
I am literally paid to be here.

**Kai Wright** (0:59)
I assume we need physically, as opposed to emotionally. Emotionally, I'm a wreck.

**Carter Sherman** (1:02)
Emotionally, that is a whole other podcast.

**Kai Wright** (1:04)
I am also physically a wreck. I used to feel quite strong. If I'm honest, Carter, I used to do a lot. I have really fallen off on my exercise routine, and I'm actually feeling quite weak.

**Carter Sherman** (1:15)
Oh, I'm so sorry. It is very easy to fall off of one's exercise routine. I feel like if I miss a week, it's all over and I'm back to being a slug for four to six months before I'll go back to the gym.
I'm asking because weight training, which is really an activity that I personally thought for many years was something that only men did in gyms, only people who look like Arnold Schwarzenegger were doing on Venice Beach. That is now an activity that's actually extremely popular among women. It is all over my Instagram feed. It feels like every day I get some new video of a woman in a very tiny workout outfit.

**Madeleine Aggeler** (1:51)
She looks great, but very tiny workout outfit. Yes.

**Carter Sherman** (1:54)
She's showing me how to do a squat, or how to do a lift, or how to build new muscle. She's always telling me that I need to really tone up my arms and shoulders. That's the big message.
Spoiler, I am not doing it. I am a cardio girlie, but the research shows that I really should be.

**Kai Wright** (2:09)
It does. Honestly, when you read the list of benefits that come from strength training, it does make you think. There's lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol.
I saw that it does something for dementia, which is a real concern of mine.

**Carter Sherman** (2:25)
Yeah, longevity is something that keeps me up at night, that is for sure. So clearly, it has a lot of upsides. But here is my issue with weight lifting, and particularly the way it gets talked about for women. I feel like that this is a way for society to define how we talk about women's bodies, to further really police women's bodies. In the 90s and the early 2000s, thin was in, right? Everybody was supposed to be heroin chic.
Then we had body positivity erupt in the 2010s, and suddenly we weren't really talking about dieting anymore. That was a forbidden word. We were talking about getting fit and doing clean eating. That was how we sort of like, you're not supposed to be just thin, you're supposed to also be athletic. Now it feels like we have really moved on, I would say, from body positivity as a movement. Instead of women being told that they should be thin, now women are being told that they should be strong. They should be not dieting, but they should be hitting protein goals, they should be operating in a calorie deficit.

**Kai Wright** (3:22)
Such words, calorie deficit.

**Carter Sherman** (3:24)
When that started appearing on my Instagram feed all the time, I was just like, what hell are we in now?

**Kai Wright** (3:29)
I mean, honestly, so there's all the ways in which this is obviously a gendered conversation, and it's gonna apply to you in very different ways than it is to me.

**Carter Sherman** (3:38)
But it doesn't not apply to you.

**Kai Wright** (3:40)
It doesn't, no, I mean, absolutely. I'm now a middle-aged man, people have a lot of ideas about what I should be doing with my body as a middle-aged man all of a sudden in my own Instagram feed, though it tends to have more to do with my belly than my muscles.
And they do have my attention, I will say. But you know, so it's gendered, but we do have to say the way that this is raced as well.