Protein Powder and the Promise of Transformation

Starting around the time I was 10, my brother took me with him on runs I could barely complete—off our street, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and back. I hated every minute of it. Each time my chest filled with a cold-metal ache that reinforced that this was not for me—to this day I run on treadmills, never outside. After one of the first times I remember eating a slice of bread with cheese—“Really?” he said, “We just went for a run, and you’re going to eat that?” If this is what it was to exercise, I would not, I promised myself, exercise again.

That was easy enough for a while—I went to a math and science high school full of kids taught to treat our bodies as meat casings for our brains. But then I found myself at a private university where some of the meat casings were taller, stronger, and belonged to people who sprinted up hills, did