Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting

By Julia Turshen and Roxane Gay

Introducing Roxane Gay & Everand Originals, a new series from Everand and the beloved bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. For the series launch, renowned cookbook author Julia Turshen writes with moving honesty about her years of disordered eating and exercising and how she freed herself from the poisonous cultural conversations about weight, discipline, and how women should look.

For most of her life, Julia Turshen has been at war with her body. Raised in a family obsessed with counting calories, she measured self-worth by the numbers on her bathroom scale. As the New York Times bestselling author of beloved cookbooks, including Small Victories and Simply Julia, she loved food and celebrated its social and cultural value, yet like so many women, she was convinced her own value would increase if only she lost ten, twenty, or however many pounds she arbitrarily believed kept her from the best version of herself. She worked out obsessively, using exercise as one more way to maintain control over her body and unruly appetites.

Julia’s attitude began to shift during the pandemic when she took a break from writing and book promotion to work on a small local farm in upstate New York. Months spent outdoors, harvesting vegetables and carrying heavy bushels of produce, transformed her body, making it bigger yet stronger. To her surprise, Turshen reveled in her new physique; she reveled in the emotional freedom physical labor gave her to eat without harsh restrictions or self-recrimination. Finally, she was breaking free of the tyranny of unrealistic body image and disordered eating.

But when the farm job ended, Julia felt herself slipping back into destructive thought patterns. Determined not to resume her relentless internal battles, she looked for activities that might replicate the joy and strength building farm work gave her. And that is how she discovered powerlifting.

Through powerlifting — the precise and careful art of hoisting increasingly heavy weights — Turshen learned to listen to her body and what it needed, be it rest, water, another plate on the barbell, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And she found a community of people, women especially, who embraced the unadultered joy of being physically strong. “I lift for my younger self and wear my singlet now to make up for all the times I wore a T-shirt over a swimsuit,” she writes, “I lift to show people what it looks like to opt out of trying to erase oneself. I lift to show that to myself.”

Both a critique of society’s obsession with weight and a beguiling memoir of self-acceptance, Built for This is a timely reminder that all bodies are powerful and deserve celebration.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Jan 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094456416

Julia Turshen

Julia Turshen, a New York Times bestselling cookbook author and teaches cooking classes most Sunday afternoons. Her latest cookbook, Simply Julia, a national bestseller, is available wherever books are sold. Julia is also the author of Now & Again (named the Best Cookbook of 2018 by Amazon and an NPR ‘Great Read’), Feed the Resistance (named the Best Cookbook of 2017 by Eater), and Small Victories (named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2016 by the New York Times and NPR). She also hosts and produces the IACP-nominated podcast called ‘Keep Calm & Cook On.’ Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her spouse Grace and their pets.

Book preview

Introduction

By Roxane Gay

I first came to Julia Turshen’s work through her lovely New York Times-bestselling cookbooks. In them, Julia’s love of food is palpable. Her recipes are thoughtfully crafted; she understands that we are not all trained chefs. I’ve cooked from Julia’s recipes often, and the dishes always turn out beautifully. One of the best things about Julia’s approach to cooking is how she avoids placing value judgments on food and strikes a balance between practical and whimsical. In Small Victories, for example, she writes about how a kitchen only needs three knives. It is refreshing to hear an experienced chef admit that you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment or dozens of knives to acquit yourself properly in the kitchen. While her advice is framed around her own experiences and what works best for her in cookery, Julia leaves much of that advice open and expansive, creating space for us to modify her counsel in ways that fit how we work in our own kitchens. Whether it’s preparing comfort foods that are both healthy and delicious, or sharing ideas for reinventing leftovers, or easy recipes for the home cook, Julia offers guidance that is thoughtful, warm, and welcoming.

In addition to authoring cookbooks, Julia hosts the podcast Keep Calm and Cook On, where she has conversations with notable figures about the ways food intersects with all aspects of our lives. On Sundays, mostly, she teaches virtual cooking classes from her kitchen that are witty and charming and so much fun. Before each class, she sends out the recipes, detailed and organized shopping lists, and always has ideas about how to modify the recipes for different diets and palates. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, Vogue, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, and many others. Suffice it to say, she knows food and is invested in the ethics of the food and foodways, social justice, and equitable access to fresh food.

But her essay, Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting, is not about food – at least, not explicitly. Instead, she chronicles her entrance into the world of powerlifting after a lifetime of disordered eating and exercise in the relentless pursuit of thinness. It is difficult to live in a human body, a body that, for most of us, is unruly, resistant to discipline. For women, bodies are especially fraught. We grow up in a culture where we are inundated by harmful messages about the bodies we should live in. Thinness is the holy grail. It is the measure of a woman’s worth, we are told. And it is nearly impossible to avoid internalizing such messages.

With admirable vulnerability, Julia writes about the internal work she has done to change her relationship to her body. It was also fascinating to enter the world of powerlifting. I particularly appreciated the way Julia wrote about learning to listen to her body, growing stronger and loving that strength, about giving herself permission to eat in the ways she wanted, and how doing these things empowered her. Built for This is a nuanced, triumphant essay and cultural critique. That energy captivated me, as I hope it will you. Anytime someone finds an easier way to live in their body, it is, to borrow the title of one of Julia’s cookbooks, a not-so-small victory.

MY SEVEN-YEAR-OLD NIECE, REMY, FELL ASLEEP ON THE COUCH. It was past her bedtime. My brother was trying to convince her to sleep in her own bed. It wasn’t working. I asked if I could try something. Do you trust me to carry you up to bed? I whispered to her. She nodded yes. I tucked the blanket around her as if she were a burrito and lifted her, blanket and all, into my arms and carried her up the staircase, straight to her bed. Of the various roles I occupy, being a strong aunt is one I really love.

How did I come to be able to easily carry a seven-year-old up a winding flight of stairs? Sure, genetics has something to do with my tree-like build, but I have also been powerlifting for a year now. Powerlifting is a weightlifting sport consisting of three specific movements — squat, bench press, deadlift — each performed with a weighted barbell. I started because I wanted to find a way to see how strong I am, and how strong I could be, that wasn’t tied to losing weight, as every other form of exercise I’ve ever tried has been. I used to walk into a room and wonder if I was the biggest person in it. Now I walk into a room and wonder how many things I can lift.

The goal of powerlifting is to perfect your form and increase the amount of weight you move in each lift. I have kept doing it because I look forward to it. Powerlifting is repetitive and predictable, which frees my anxious mind from wondering what will happen when I show up to the gym. I know not only what I am going to do, but I also know I can do it. I pick things up and put them back where I found them.

Powerlifting allows me to go through life knowing how strong I am. It is a quiet knowing. I don’t have to announce it. Lifting heavy things regularly helps me feel less dependent on everyone else for the types of validation I’ve long sought. It has allowed me to

Reviews for Roxane Gay & Everand Originals

[andy05152012 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very moving (no pun intended). Thank you, Julia, for such an informative, healing, affirming essay. Once I started reading it, I couldn't stop. You've given me a lot to think about. That doesn't happen too often.