In 2020 I solo-hiked the Colorado Trail, a 500-mile trek from Denver to Durango, weaving through several mountain ranges along the western side of the state. It was an incredible experience that tested my physical endurance and mental resolve.
When I tell folks about this thru-hike, the first question is usually “How much weight did you lose?” My usual response is, “What does it matter how much weight I lost?” They are shocked that I don’t want to talk about my weight. I’d prefer to share my story about being alone in the mountains for a month, and having to scare off a bear.
American culture’s focus on weight loss is unfortunately detached from actual physical and mental well-being. I’ve long been an advocate for body positivity and fat acceptance, and this experience further cemented those beliefs. I want to share what body positivity means for me, and how I think it can help mend a toxic mentality around dieting.
*This essay isn’t making the argument that hiking is a fix for anything. While I examine this topic through the lens of a thru-hike, I also want to address the rampant ableism in our society. You can never fully understand another person’s embodied experience. Hiking might not be possible for everyone because of physical limits, work, family, or simply not wanting to be tired, stinky, and bitten by insects – none of this says anything about a person’s strength or value. My experience hiking is just a lens to dig into these larger cultural issues.
Lastly, Content/Trigger warning: some discussion and description of eating disorders.*
I wasn’t surprised that people lead with questions about weight loss. Most of the hiking blogs I’ve found prominently feature the changes to a hiker’s weight and body fat ratio. It irritated me then when I read it, and it irritates me now when I hear it in person. People use weight loss as shorthand for physical experience, but it’s not equivalent.
Losing a few pounds doesn’t describe my trek through the San Juans, rolling along through thousands of feet of elevation change, through 20 mile days. Weight loss doesn’t capture my decision to push an extra 5 miles in order to camp past the 200-mile-marker; my legs and feet were about to fall off by the end of that day, but I will never forget the feeling of accomplishment.
While long-distance hiking requires a certain level of able-bodiedness, there were a wide variety of body types on the trail. Honestly, I thought it would just be white guys in their 20s-30s. While there were plenty of those, it wasn’t everyone. I was easily out-hiked by a couple in their mid-60s. I took a break on one of the highest mountain passes with two brothers in their 70s who called themselves ‘The Grandpas.’ There were a lot of people with heavier builds, and folks who relied on a combination of knee braces and hiking poles, travelling as their bodies allowed. Yes, there were also the competitive push-yourself-to-the-limit types, but generally there was a ‘You do you’ philosophy among hikers. We’re all on the same trail, experiencing the challenges and accomplishments together. I loved it.
Diet culture is the opposite of this.
American diet culture is toxic. It tells people to dissociate from the internal signals of their bodies. Diet trends come and go while obesity has risen by more than 10% in the last ten years (per the CDC website). Most people diet, and those diets clearly don’t work. Diets tell us we should only eat certain kinds of food, or count calories instead of eating when we are hungry. Diets teach people to follow strict rules instead of trusting themselves. And most diets aren’t scientifically backed, they are just different ways to trick people into eating fewer calories.
My experience on the thru-hike profoundly changed my relationship with my body and with hunger. Quarantine was definitely a low point for my physical and mental health, and getting out on regular backpacking trips was a much needed reset. Spending a month out in the woods was absolutely transformative. My pack was around 30 pounds, and I was hiking 20+ miles a day for five weeks. I discovered the reality of ‘hiker hunger.’
Feeling constant hunger gave me a newfound joy and gratitude around eating. Most of the time I subsisted on trail-mix, ramen, and pouched tuna. To this day I still remember being gifted some snap peas from a day hiker – they were so cool and crisp. A person I met in a trail-head parking lot gave me a couple tomatoes and plums from her garden, they tasted so incredibly sweet and I will never forget the simple joy of that fruit. My body was turning food into miles, and was so grateful for the strength it gave me.
Our society is not configured to maintain physical health. School is sedentary. Work is often sedentary. Cities are designed around cars. Our entertainment typically comes from sitting in front of a screen. Our bodies are just not an active part of our daily lives. On top of that we’re bombarded with food advertisements, and food as entertainment. Still, we have the audacity to say that weight is an individual’s problem, a moral failing. According to the CDC, almost half our country (42%) is obese. This is clearly systematic, and that’s why fat acceptance/body positivity is so important.
What fat acceptance means to me is that a person’s body is their own damn business. Most people have a knee-jerk reaction when they hear ‘fat acceptance’, as though they are being told to throw nutrition and exercise out the window and that the goal is to be overweight. That’s not it at all. People will make the best decisions around their health and wellness when they feel positively connected to their bodies. We have such deeply ingrained hate, shame, and guilt around fat, and those feelings don’t help anyone.
Our cultural obsession with thinness and weight loss has nothing to do with health. I do want to be clear, obesity does correlate with a variety of health issues. On my dad’s side, my family has a strong tendency towards diabetes and gall-bladder problems that are exacerbated by diet and nutrition habits. Obesity can have negative health consequences. However, fatness is treated with a level of hate and disgust that isn’t proportionate to its possible health effects. My mother’s parents never experienced obesity, but they both had extremely high cholesterol that resulted in both of them having heart issues – my grandmother ultimately passed from a stroke; but no one gave them side-eye when they strayed from the dietary guidelines their doctors gave them; they didn’t experience negative and judgemental comments about their food choices, even though those choices harmed their health, because they were thin.
Diet culture was actively harmful to me well into my 20s, as I cycled through eating disorders. When I was in college, I was in the depths of combined anorexia/bulimia. I was at my lowest weight as a result of nonsensical food restrictions and overexercising. At the same time, I was constantly complimented on my weight loss. I received so much positive attention for being thin, and yet I had never been more unhealthy. My mental health was shot. The diet was destructive and isolating. But all people could see was that I had lost weight – I was thin, so everything must be fine. It took lots of therapy to untangle that web, and to this day disordered eating still lurks in the background. I’m still not 100% over it.
Regular hiking and yoga have helped to restore trust in my body. That kind of exercise feels loving and emotionally nourishing to me. During the thru-hike I took a rest day each week – sometimes in a town, other times I just hung out at my campsite. On my final rest day, I split a motel room with a couple of new hiking friends. They were both guys in their early 20s. We sat around chatting, while a ‘Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives’ marathon played on the ancient TV. Over the background noise we talked about philosophy, society, and began to open up about our life experiences. None of us knew each other before the Colorado Trail, and I was surprised when one of the guys was brave enough to share that he was recovering from an eating disorder. The second guy had a similar experience. We wound up talking about the fixation on weight loss stories from thru-hikers, and we were all dreading the questions we’d be asked when we returned to normal society. For us, hiking wasn’t about weight. It was about healing, and it took us out of the cycle of body dysphoria.
The thru-hike was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Daily challenges seem much more manageable, even a year later. When I get frustrated, I remind myself that I walked over entire mountain ranges with nothing but a pack on my back. My physical confidence is stronger than it’s ever been before. And this confidence comes from a place of self-love, not because I chased after some arbitrary ideal. That’s what I want to see across our society.
Icons like Lizzo are doing so much to break the stigma around fatness, but so much more work still needs to be done. We need to stop making unsolicited comments about other people’s bodies. We need to stop stigmatizing each other’s food choices. We need to stop our own internal monologues of self-loathing. At the end of the day, hate will never result in better health. In order to make positive health decisions we need to be positive about our bodies and our well-being.
More reading:
I didn’t get into race and weightloss, but this article will give you info from experts.
https://www.popsugar.com/latina/8-latinx-nutritionists-dietitians-fight-dieting-myths-ig-48490689
This spring, I read a fantastic book, Disfigured: On Fairytales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda LeDuc. It’s heartfelt, funny, and a great exploration of ableism. Read the book and check out this interview with the author!