Author Talks: Doing the heavy lifting

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Christine Y. Chen chats with journalist and professional body builder Anne Marie Chaker about Lift: How Women Can Reclaim Their Physical Power and Transform Their Lives (Avery/Penguin Random House, June 2025). Chaker shares how fitness training helped her overcome challenges, reclaim her physical strength, and enhance her sense of agency, power, and confidence. She offers tips for women to find strength in saying “no,” raising their voices, and being unapologetically authentic. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.

Why did you write this book?

I was a longtime reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and there was a difficult period in my life. I was struggling with postpartum depression, the end of my marriage, and the death of my father. To counter these seismic changes, I began leaning on alcohol. I’d never been much of a drinker before, but I began—and continued—drinking to take the edge off.

My fitness journey started one day when I was with my kid at a hockey tournament in a hotel. In the hotel fitness room, I saw a hockey mom who was crushing her workout. She was lifting barbells, pulling bands, and doing things I’d never seen before.

I thought to myself, “I want to be like that.” So, I approached her. She said that she participated in body-building competitions, which sounded odd but intriguing. I contacted her coach, and I thought, “I could use some help with getting on a healthier path, eating better, exercising, and joining a gym.”

In the process, I saw what my body could do. It transformed, and so did I. That led me to explore this journey. I wrote Lift to share that awakening and to help women reframe the way we think about strength, power, and our bodies.

When you entered the world of body building, what were some of the things that surprised you?

After a couple years of this activity, my coach said, “You put muscle on really easily. You should consider doing one of these competitions.”

Initially, I said, “No way.” I had zero interest in that idea. Fake tans, blingy bikinis just seemed to be about vanity, ego, or something. Yet I decided to do it.

I figured, “What the heck? I’m in my 40s now. I might as well give it a whirl, maybe get a story out of it, and write about it for [The Wall Street] Journal.” But what I found was that it’s really about discipline and patience and pushing yourself past what you think your limits are.

I surprised myself by becoming a pro athlete at 50. That was not in the plan. The biggest revelation has been getting to speak with so many women—moms, grandmothers, survivors, first-time lifters—women who, through this journey, have discovered a whole new version of themselves they never thought was possible, through strength. Their stories and my story remind me that transformation is always possible and that we are all stronger and more capable than we think we are.

For me, the biggest surprise was how empowering the experience felt. I entered a world that was so different from the newspaper world that I had long inhabited. There was a great community of people whom I never would have met otherwise. It was a blast.

What kind of people have you met through your body-building journey?

I often joke that when you enter these competitions, you see every kind of car in the parking lot. You see Teslas, fancy cars, pickup trucks with red-state bumper stickers, blue-state bumper stickers, and everything in between.

I’ve met incredible single moms, army women, “desperate housewives,” women who are hoping for their best postdivorce body, every race, creed, socioeconomic class at these competitions. There, all that matters is what you’ve put in and what you’re putting in onstage. I love that. They are a very diverse and fun cast of characters.

How did this hobby turn into a book?

It started with a simple but profound realization that I worked better once I started lifting. I thought more clearly. I moved with more confidence. My work got better. After years of fighting my own body and chasing this ideal that I could never really meet—a thin ideal—I began to see that there was something else that I really believed. I loved feeling like being more.

I loved the idea of “moreness,” rather than “lessness,” and the feeling that suddenly, everything in my body worked better. I felt that having an athletic physique was, maybe, the one that I was supposed to have all along, which made the journalist in me want to learn more.

This book is more than a memoir. You write about the history, sociology, and science of strength. You also give practical advice for women who want to get stronger. How did you decide to include all these angles?

It’s all interconnected. My story was one of self-discovery. I started digging into the science of female strength. I found that there isn’t much information, because practically every study that has to do with muscle and strength has been done on men.

Some glimmers of what I found spoke volumes to me about women and strength. Fundamentally, women were never meant to be thin. Women were meant to be strong. There was a Cambridge study that showed that early women’s bone structure was the size of Olympic rowers today, which blew my mind.

The idea that women were trying to be thin back then or picking berries in the field while men hunted was so false. Women were an integral part of agriculture. They were lifting heavy things. They were going out for the hunt as well.

Another thing that fascinated me was how, over time, women have always outlived men. Countless studies show that we can tolerate pain and hold certain types of exercises and isometric holds longer than men. There’s a rich history of women and strength. That fact, combined with my own experience of how a strong body felt like the body I was supposed to have, really spoke to me. This is the strong body we are meant to have.

This notion of thinness is really a fairly recent phenomenon. It’s a false construct that was encouraged by a society that, frankly, wanted women to be small and diminutive. A big part of my book is the exploration of how and why skinny was never meant to be.

What did you learn about the business of being skinny while researching your book?

Skinny has a long history in marketing, in pharmaceuticals. It’s the thing that women are literally fed from the moment they are born. It’s in the name of the crackers we buy at the grocery store to the cut of the jeans we wear. Skinny is everywhere, to the point that we stop even noticing it.

We’ve seen progress: More brands today are starting to show women of different body types, for example, muscular women, which is good. Yet there is still a long way to go. Even when campaigns do celebrate strength, superficially, they still promote a lot of unrealistic ideals behind the scenes. Brands have a responsibility to not just reflect change but to lead it by populating their imagery with women who embody all kinds of sizes and strengths.

What do you make of the recent popularity of semaglutides?

The big issue with semaglutides is that they have been shown to take muscle away from patients. This is a huge issue, particularly for women who need as much muscle as they can get for, you know, reasons of osteopenia and osteoporosis.

Muscle acts as a cushion to bone. The more muscle you have on your frame, the more likely you’ll be to have a longer and less injury-prone life. I’ve written about how gyms are starting to offer glucagon-like peptide-1s (GLP-1s), which I have mixed feelings about.

On the one hand, people will seek GLP-1s anyway, so maybe they can also be encouraged to not skip out on weight training. On the other hand, I worry about the cosmetic pressure for people to obtain GLP-1s and to further emphasize the skinny ideal, which has not served women very well.

In your book, you tell the stories of some remarkable, strong women from history. Who were some of the standouts?

I reviewed archives, old photos, and academic studies. I researched the forgotten history of women who were strong before it was fashionable or acceptable to even be so. I considered people like the great Sandwina, a strongwoman performer in the 1800s who would throw her husband over her head, or the trailblazing women of the 1970s who helped create women’s body building. Those were “delicious” stories.

One story that stayed with me was Pudgy Stockton, who performed on Muscle Beach in California while wearing a polka-dot bikini, which women hadn’t been wearing. In the 1940s, two-piece swimsuits challenged every stereotype of femininity.

The derby women of the ’50s, who were superstars in the long-forgotten sport of roller skating around a track—pushing and shoving one another—were amazing.

Then there was Edith Murway-Traina, a world record holder who, in her 90s, discovered deadlifting at a senior center. She was dragged to a fitness class by a friend and fell in love with the sensation of lifting. She became very good at it and began entering competitions in her 90s. She blew her coach away.

I loved her story about how athletics was not available to her while growing up and about how lucky she felt to access that world later in life. She felt that she was very good at this.

You write that modern women ‘are not comfortable taking up actual space.’ Can you elaborate?

Body building taught me to own my space and my body in a way that I hadn’t before—not to shrink, not to apologize. I was always one to say, “Oh. I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” Many do that.

I largely attribute showing up in spaces with some presence and some power to lifting. That physical lift created a real mental shift for me. I found myself setting boundaries more clearly, walking into rooms with more certainty, saying no, which was always something I had trouble with. It’s really about so much more than muscle, but also about your voice and agency and really seeing yourself as powerful. I really believe that strength training does that.

What advice do you have for women who are busy with their careers and their families and for whom fitness often falls by the wayside?

So many of us struggle with the idea of what something is supposed to look like or the idea that something has to be just so or perfect. You don’t need hours or an outfit or perfection. You just need to be consistent. What I mean by consistency is that during some weeks when I can’t get to a gym, all I can manage is 20 minutes at a time in the basement with my dumbbells. Other times, I have more time.

Not every workout is great. Some workouts really suck. That’s OK, as long as I show up because the small acts really do add up. The point is just to start and to treat your strength like it really matters because it does. It really will shift your quality of life in a big way.

Watch the full interview