Ya know, I'm sorry to be the one voice to go against the grain here, but it was reading posts like this one before my 2005 thru hike attempt, that left me with a lot of regrets.......

Before I started I was a good 30lbs overweight but listened to everyone saying if I started out slow, listened to my body, went at my own pace, etc etc, then the weight would come pouring off. I would justify this too with logic like :hey you spend day after day doing nothing but hiking up and down hills and burning all those calories, it's simple mathematics, WEIGHT LOSS MUST HAPPEN! And I didn't give a second thought to what I ate while on the trail because I had read you burn something like a bizzillion calories a day hiking so GREAT! I'll eat what ever I want! Heck, to listen to people talk I almost had visions of me starting up one side of the mountain as a sack of potatoes and climbing down the other side as a super skinny weif like model!!

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!!!

I made it approx. 700 miles to Pearisburg, VA and the day I stopped I weighted exactly the same as the day I started. And I was in horrible shape. I had absolutely no energy, I was cronically exhausted, sleeping an average of 12 hours a night and still feeling like I hadn't gotten enough sleep. Most of all, the entire trip was one long memory of pain filled days that began almost immediately and no amount of Advil could touch. Later on I learned that I had collapsed the arches of both of my feet. Since I hadn't gotten into shape and lost the extra weight before the trip, my combined body and pack weight tipped the scale over 200lbs! My knees, ankles and feet just couldn't handle that load, especially over the rugged AT terrain. As for my energy level, I hadn't paid attention to what I ate, which resulted in eating the standard hiking fare of empty calories and "fake" food that slowly but steadily drained my body of life day by day. By the time I limped into Pearisburg, I was whipped both physically and mentally, and my having to the leave the trail was a foregone conclusion.

Since that ill-fated trip I have learned alot. I have spent two years learning from my mistakes and educating myself on ultralite hiking concepts. I will be attempting to thru hike again this summer and I have started training NOW. I also plan on eating REAL food while out there and eating sensibly. I have no doubt that the out come of this trip will be very different from the first.

Now this is just my own personal experience and maybe it's not the normal one. But my advise is, if you are planning to thru hike and are overweight, loss as much weight as you can before you go or at least be in the best possible shape that you can be in before you start. You will only be giving yourself a wonderful advantage and healthy head start right from the get go so why wouldn't you? Learn from my mistakes and save yourself the pain not to mention the medical bills.