Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Reclaim Your Personal Strength With Anne Marie Chaker
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:03.7] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 523 of Live Happy Now. When we talk about becoming strong women, we’re often not talking about something physical, but this week’s guest tells us how reclaiming our physical power can also build our inner strength. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I’m joined by Anne Marie Chaker, author of Lift: How Women Can Reclaim Their Physical Power and Transform Their Lives.
Using her own life-changing experiences in bodybuilding, combined with a deep dive into research on how we’ve been taught to view our bodies, Anne Marie provides a roadmap to rethinking body image and discovering true power and confidence that goes well beyond our size. Let’s have a listen.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:45.9] PF: Anne Marie, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.
[0:00:48.9] AMC: Oh, Paula, it’s great to meet you.
[0:00:51.2] PF: The topic that you’ve written about is something that I’ve been really intrigued with for several years, and I had never seen a book on it because you have written a book about how strength training can really change women, not just physically but it really changes us from the inside out, and can we start by talking about how you came to write this book?
[0:01:10.5] AMC: Yeah, yeah. So, the book was born a really difficult time in my life. I had recently had a baby and was really struggling, kind of surprised with how much I was struggling with postpartum depression, and was nursing my baby on the couch, on the living room, one day, when a neighbor came to my house and knocked on the door, and said my father had died, suddenly, just walking the dog, had a heart attack.
My folks lived a couple of doors down, and the combination of that and the end of my marriage just threw me for a loop. Every truth I had imagined about my life was suddenly being upended, and I counted 11 days or something ridiculous, where I just could not sleep, which you probably know, is a sign of depression.
[0:02:05.3] PF: Absolutely.
[0:02:06.0] AMC: Just could not sleep, and a neighbor came over to my house one night, and was like, “You know, just have a little glass of wine, it will help take the edge off and put you to sleep.” So, I’ve never been much of a drinker, but you know, occasional social, whatever, but that glass of wine helped, took the edge off, helped me sleep, and then, that glass turned into another glass, and then it went from there.
And so, pretty soon, I was addicted to the stuff and could not stop drinking. This went on for months, months became a year. I don’t even remember, but there was like a – you know, this went on for a long time. All of it came to a head one day when I remember taking my daughters to a hockey tournament. My daughters played ice hockey at the time, and I coached their team, and my mom came with me.
I was a newly single mom, so mom was always around helping me out with the stroller and the kids in the station wagon or whatever when we pack the hockey bags, and I’m driving to this tournament, and in the car is like two and a half hour car ride could not stop thinking about when I would get my next drink, and “God, mom is with me, how am I going to get around this issue? Mom, being with me, and I need a drink, and how am I going to do this?”
And, as I’m having these thoughts, I am thinking, “Oh my God, I have a problem.” And it was just crystal clear to me in that car ride that I needed help. So, I get to the hockey tournament and unload, bring the bags to the room and so forth, and I remember poking my head into this fitness room, and in this fitness room was a hockey mom who was just by herself, in this small room with barbells and dumbbells and just crushing her workout.
And she looked like she knew what she was doing, and she was buff and she was sweating, and she was pulling on bands and lifting, and I thought, “Whatever this woman is on, give me some of that.” Like, it was her confidence, her know how and how she was muscular, and I just thought, “This woman is the shit.” So, I kind of went up to her and I said, you know, what’s your story like? What sport do you do, like, are you into CrossFit?”
“Like, what’s the deal?” And she said, “Oh no, I do bikini competitions.” And so, I remember thinking that sounded insane. I didn’t even know what that was. I said, “What is that, like beauty contest?” And she said, “No-no-no, it’s the sport of bodybuilding and I compete and I track macros and nutrition.” And she just like, was going on about having a coach, and I just thought, “Wow.” And I said, “Well, you look amazing, I look like shit, I think I have drinking problem.”
“So, give me the name of your coach and I’ll get in touch with her when I can.” So, that’s how it started. I reached out to the coach, and that’s how my journey began.
[0:04:46.0] PF: And, strength training and bodybuilding is so different than other forms of exercise. You know, I know people find different niches that work for them and try different things. Like, with running like, you can take a run or a jog and just kind of beat it out of your system and feel that runner’s high. So, there’s different effects that it has. What was it about strength training, working with weights, that really resonated with you?
[0:05:12.4] AMC: That’s interesting. Well, there are a couple of things. This coach that I started working with, the first thing she did was to just have me, before we got into exercise or any of it, she said, “Let’s just look at what you’re eating on a day-to-day basis.” Because actually, bodybuilding and nutrition is a big part of like what you consume and protein. So, that was “Numero uno,” she said, “Start looking at what you eat.”
So, we started keeping a log of – or I started keeping a log of everything I consumed during the day, and we found that I wasn’t eating enough. I was basically going from coffee in the morning to whatever scraps came off my children’s plates over the course of the day, and then, wine.
[0:05:53.7] PF: Not really a balanced nutritional.
[0:05:56.2] AMC: In the breakfast of champions, right? So, she said, “Well, that’s not good,” and she said, “You’re not eating nearly enough.” So, we bolstered my “cals,” especially protein, and started paying real attention to protein, and eating whole foods, lots of them, and eating really well, and this blew me away because my whole life, I had been taught to basically eat less, right?
Like, “Oh my God, we should be thin, we shouldn’t be eating so much,” and like, cut your portion sizes in half. Like, all the stuff that we’re constantly obsessing about. So, the idea of like, eating more, great, and then once we started fixing that, then she put me on an exercise program, and I started going to a gym. But again, this blew my mind because it wasn’t about cardio, which was a thing that I thought you’re supposed to do when you go into the gym is like burn the calories, right?
It was about lifting, lifting heavy weights. So, this combination of eating plenty and lifting heavy really transformed me. It was like, within weeks, I started to feel better. I stopped reaching for alcohol just because I felt like I was really well-nourished, and I didn’t like the craving for it anymore, and I just started feeling like way more confident about myself. Like, I had once been an athlete, and like, I felt like an athlete again.
And so, I started sitting up taller and even kind of kicking ass at work. I remember just approaching my calls. Like, I could hear it in my voice when I was interviewing, like, I sounded more confident, I pushed back, I said “No.” You know, I created a Match.com profile, I met my future husband on Match, like, all of these things, I was like, “Who is this person, right?” And I really attribute it to the strength training.
It was so clear to me, just from the sample size of one, right? Just me, that there was a real connection here with how strength translated to my life, and it – and I wanted – the journalist in me wanted to know more. Like, I wanted to understand like, what scientifically was going on here and what – just because like, it was so clear to me that my whole life, I had been pushed to be less, and suddenly, here’s this coach telling me I should be more, and at – when I embrace that, everything kind of clicked into place.
[0:08:19.6] PF: Yeah.
[0:08:19.6] AMC: It still amazes me.
[0:08:20.7] PF: And, I’m so glad you brought that up. You know, I had mentioned to you that I – the owner of the cross fit gym here in Nashville that I met, had gone through a lot of addiction issues, and when she discovered cross fit, it changed her life, and she’s now doing like, fitness competitions, ranking very high in the US for her bodybuilding, and she talked about how finding that strength, that physical strength, gave her the strength to fight the addiction.
It gave her the strength to leave a bad marriage, it gave her the strength to pursue a college degree, and just really transformed her. So, your experience is similar. What is it about lifting heavy things that does more than transform our bodies? How does it transform our mind, and kind of like, our outlook on things?
[0:09:07.8] AMC: Yeah, I mean, there’s a ton of fascinating research when you start digging into the science that talks about the mind-body connection and how lifting heavy, like, you know, you get this burst of endorphins, right? So, I mean, I even feel that today, like, whenever I go into the gym, I could be feeling like, “Oh, I don’t feel like doing this, I feel like I should [crosstalk 0:09:27.6]” And then, the minute I start lifting, it’s just like – like I feel great.
It’s the most bizarre thing, but just that move, like, after a couple of minutes of it, it’s like, my whole outlook changes. So, you know, there’s a ton of studies on the incredible neurological connection between exercise and mental health. But the thing I think is even more important, which my book delves into, is the history of women and strength and muscle, and when I started digging into that, I found that we were never meant to be thin.
Like, this whole can see of skinny and thinness is a fairly modern construct, but that when you look at early women, and I became really enamored of the work of this anthropologist, out of Cambridge, who did this fascinating study about early women, paleolithic or very early women, and their bone structure, and nobody had ever looked at this, but what she had done was compared the bone structure of these early women to modern athletes.
And also just a sample size of regular students, more sedentary students, but what she had found was the bones of the early women were about the size of Olympic rowers today, maybe even more.
[0:10:55.5] PF: Oh wow.
[0:10:57.6] AMC: So, what she said was that this blew her mind because women, the whole idea that like, men were out hunting, while women were picking berries in the field, was false. Like, women were strong, and they were an integral part of agriculture, and they were lifting heavy things, and they were killing it out in the fields. So, when I read about this woman and her work, I was like, “God, what happened from there to like, suddenly, these like, super models and praising thinness?”
And it became so clear that like, this is the body that we were meant to inhabit, that we were meant to be strong. There’s all kinds of evidence that we are, you know, we think of strength as like, something in the male domain. Like, “Oh, men can lift heavier weights, they have bigger upper bodies, they have bigger hearts.” But actually, there’s a whole litany of literature on how women are stronger than men in a lot of ways. We withstand pain, we withstand fatigue longer than men do; there’s a ton of research on this.
There’s all this focus on longevity right now, my God, women have lived longer than men for as long as we have data on lifespan. Centenarians, they looked at centenarians, the vast majority of people who live over a hundred are women. So, I became very interested in that, and just how, you know, especially with women being more susceptible to bone breakage, it’s even more important for us to embrace muscle and strength, and it feels like we’re entering this moment right now where we’re suddenly realizing this, and it’s a good place to be.
[BREAK]
[0:12:42.5] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now. Now, let’s hear more from Anne Marie Chaker.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:12:56.1] PF: You also mentioned in your book about how we are kind of moving in that body positivity direction, and then something happened, like we did a U-turn.
[0:13:04.6] AMC: Yeah.
[0:13:05.2] PF: And we’re back to it is interesting –
[0:13:07.4] AMC: Ozempic.
[0:13:08.3] PF: Yes, yeah, Ozempic, and people are saying like, for me, when someone says, “I just want to be skinny.” I kind of wince because to me, skinny equals unhealthy, like I’m –
[0:13:18.2] AMC: You know, it’s –
[0:13:18.7] PF: And I appreciate, I associate being lean with being fit, but when I hear skinny, I’m like, “Ooh, that’s not good.”
[0:13:25.7] AMC: Yeah. Well, you can be – I have a friend who is lean and has osteoporosis because – I mean, you can be lean, but not have enough – it’s just super important because we live in a society where it’s either one thing or the other, right? It’s fat or thin, and I feel like we’ve lost the plot that there’s this whole thing in the middle called strength, and you know you can have a high BMI, but not be fat, you know?
[0:13:56.5] PF: Right.
[0:13:57.3] AMC: So, there’s this whole thing with muscle that I think everybody should, we should stop obsessing over thinness or over – just start finding your strength, and I feel like a lot of the other stuff just falls into place.
[0:14:12.5] PF: One thing, and I am sure you’ve heard this, women kind of push back on strength training because they think they’re going to get big and bulky, and they’re going to look like a man.
[0:14:19.9] AMC: Right.
[0:14:20.9] PF: And that just can’t happen. The female bodybuilders that they see are putting a lot of effort, they’re waking up every three hours, and shoving protein down to make their, you know, size.
[0:14:32.0] AMC: Right.
[0:14:32.8] PF: So, can you talk about that, how we’re not going to become less feminine by developing strength?
[0:14:39.2] AMC: I still hear that to this day, and like, “I don’t want to get bulky,” or, “How can I do this, and not get bulky?” And I think it comes from a lot of nonsense we read when we were young. You know, I loved the Teen Bop Magazines, and you know, Seventeen, and all these, and I remember reading in them like you know, “Lift low weights at high repetition so that you don’t get bulky,” which is such nonsense.
The fact is, we don’t have enough testosterone in our bodies as women to be able to get big and bulky. So, you can lift all you want, and I tried, and make more muscle, and get bigger, and I can’t because you know, I just don’t have that kind of testosterone. I think the other thing that you know, make people wonder about this is when they think of bodybuilding, they think of in 80s, the pictures of –
[0:15:29.8] PF: Oh yeah.
[0:15:30.4] AMC: Bodybuilders who look just like –
[0:15:31.9] PF: Rachel Mclish, and all that.
[0:15:33.3] AMC: Yes, yes, and there was a phase where, you know, that look was very celebrated. I think it’s less now. I mean, I think, you know, a lot of – I should say, I am the “natural bodybuilder.” I compete in drug-tested federations, but not all of them do, and there’s a lot of manipulation of performance-enhancing drugs in the sports, but most people, like me and you, are never going to get that way.
[0:16:03.9] PF: We’re not going to have trouble yet.
[0:16:05.2] AMC: I’ve had a lot of juice, yeah.
[0:16:08.0] PF: That’s great. So, when people, women that you’ve worked with, women that you’ve encouraged to get into this, how do you see them change when they start discovering their physical strength?
[0:16:19.7] AMC: I see more joy. You know, I’ve been working on a Substack newsletter called Lift, and interviewing lots of women from all walks of life discovering strength, and it’s like a revolution, I feel like, especially women in menopause. They’re fed up with having heard all the messages and marketing. I mean, look, from the moment we’re born, we’re fed this ideal of thinness and skinny.
It’s in the name of the crackers and the grocery store, Wheat Thins, thins this, thins that, the name of the jeans we buy are skinny this, and it’s just – it’s a no-win game. We’re never going to be enough. It is like this constant messaging that you are never going to be thin enough, it is never enough, and be less, and you know it’s exhausting, and I think especially women in their 40s, 50s, and – but you’re just suddenly getting those message of like, “Screw that, get strong.”
“Lift weights” feels really good, and once they start stepping into the gym and discovering that, often, for the first time, or rediscovering it from a time when they were younger and more athletic, it’s a revelation.
[0:17:35.2] PF: And then, how does that change the way that they move through the world that they present themselves at home, at work, with their friends, how does that transform us?
[0:17:44.5] AMC: I mean, here is just one – I mean, there’s so many studies on this, but one that I think is fascinating is there was a piece of research on just weightlifting’s impact on memory, and the researchers studied people who lifted weights exclusively, and then those who did more cardio exercises, and then those who did a combination of strength and cardio, and compared how well they remembered images on a card.
And then, compared that to people who didn’t do any exercise at all, and it was the people who did the strength only, who remembered the images on the card more than even those who did the combination strength and cardio. So, the power, and I don’t know, like I don’t know what the science of why exactly, but there is true power in strength and the mind-body connection of strength, and that combined, I think, with like, women’s embrace of it, when they’ve been told their whole lives to not, is just – it’s very much in the zeitgeist, right now.
[0:18:56.2] PF: Yeah, and how does that change how they receive, like, criticism, how they receive, you know, if they’re in a relationship where they get yelled at or things like that, how does that strength start pushing back and start changing the way that they receive that? How does that strength start pushing back and start changing the way that they receive that?
[0:19:13.7] AMC: I mean, I can tell you from my life that strength training is – I almost think of it as an allegory, right? When I’m in the gym, and it’s my one respite in the day from like, all the stress, all the crap, and it’s like it’s just me and the barbell, and I think of lifting that barbell over my head as kind of almost a symbol of me being able to lift anything away that’s bothering me, or all the stress or, there’s something very powerful.
I don’t know that any other form of exercise really gives you that, and I bring that home with me, and when I come home from a lift, I feel like I can conquer the world, and I hear that from a lot of people, that strength training really helps boost their confidence, and feeling like they can protect themselves and that they can do more, and it feels good to take up more space, both in the gym and in life.
[0:20:15.1] PF: It does. So, where do people get started? Where do women go to get started and find a safe space for that, because you know, going to a bodybuilding gym may not be the place to start, but a place like you know, LA Fitness might not be quite right for them either. So, how do they start and really find that place where they can learn about strength training and really start diving into that?
[0:20:35.5] AMC: That’s a great question. So, I would ask yourself what you like best. Do you like being by yourself and having a few things around the house and just being able to pick them up and get 30 minutes in when you can, or do you like getting out of the house and going to the gym and having lots of space and seeing other people? And I mean, everybody’s different, some of us are introverts, some of us are extroverts, and then I’m kind of both, I think.
So, I like having some stuff at home on the days when “Ugh, it’s too cold,” or I don’t feel like it, or just need to get it in. I have just a few things. Joining a gym can be a great idea, and there’s a couple of reason why. One is it can be really good to get out of the house. You know, a lot of us work from home now, which is wonderful, but it’s also really good to get out of the house and see other people, even if you don’t interact much with them, it’s good.
There’s more room at the gym, there’s more stuff. Joining a gym, you get a couple of freebie sessions with a personal trainer, and that can be good to get launched on knowing what’s around, knowing what to do, and you meet people, you’re part of a community. I have met some really nice women, and it’s important. I feel like it’s important for us to take up more space in gyms.
Gyms can be really bro-y environments, and I’m starting to see more women inhabit gyms, which I think is a wonderful trend, and not just on the cardio machine. So, I’ve always make a point of like introducing myself to another woman that I might see in the weight room, and being that one to say, “Hey, I’m Anne Marie, what are you doing? Like, where do you live? Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here, there need to be more of us here,” da-da-da-da. So, it’s just really nice. So, it’s good to kind of have both options, I feel like.
[0:22:28.3] PF: So, with your book, Lift, you’ve given us a great way to reframe our relationship with our bodies and really think a lot of things that we thought we knew to be correct, and what is it that you hope the book is going to accomplish as women read this?
[0:22:42.6] AMC: I want women to know that they are true athletes, that even if they think they aren’t, they are. Women are strong, stronger than men in many ways, and our bodies are incredible. We live longer than men, we bring life into the world, we multitask like nobody’s business, we raise children, and our bodies need to be well-nourished and strong to reflect that. I want women to not beat themselves up for having once wanted to be thin, or you know, that’s not your fault.
It’s every message you have ever received from the time you were born has told you to be less than, but I want women to feel like they are more than. They are more than, and to embrace the strength that they were always meant to have and go out there and have fun and lift some weights and kick some ass, and let me know how that goes.
[0:23:36.8] PF: I love that. That was a great way to wrap that up. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is –
[0:23:41.0] AMC: Oh, thanks, Paula.
[0:23:41.8] PF: We’re going to tell the listeners where they can find you, follow you on social media, on Substack, find your book, and learn more about lifting.
[0:23:50.5] AMC: Thanks, Paula, great to be here.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:23:56.0] PF: That was Anne Marie Chaker, talking about how strength training can help women recover their true power and confidence. If you’d like to learn more about Anne Marie, follow her on Substack or social media, or discover her book, Lift: How Women Can Reclaim Their Physical Power and Transform Their Lives. Just visit us at LiveHappy.com and click on this podcast episode.
That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode, and until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
