Can Hiking Make You Fat?

[Pedaling Fool]

A lot of this blog I agree with, but much of it I just see people that are looking for a quick-fix in the way of true health. In this case the quick-fix would be a thru-hike, I think some people believe that once they complete a thru-hike then they are set for life with respect to health. However, nothing could be further from the truth -- it goes against nature -- for proof just go to any hiker reunion.

I also don't agree with the notion that a thru-hike or any high-endurance activity screws up one's metabolism for life, yes it does change, but to say it's screwed for life is just another attempt by some to NOT take responsibility for their actions.

http://180metabolism.com/blog/?p=70

Long blog, so I'll just post an excerpt:

“When I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail on the occasion of my fiftieth birthday in 2001, I hoped to receive the gift of physical health. The Trail granted my wish, helping me get in the best shape of my life. My post-hike adjustment, however, failed miserably – at least from the standpoint of sustaining the same health benefits at home.

Some of the post-hike problems were simple: I did not know how to perform stretching exercises, so painful muscle tightness immobilized me. But, more troubling was the inability to “downshift” my metabolism without exercise: my weight increased by a half-pound per day for weeks. It seemed that the same foods I ate before hiking the Trail made me heavy. I went from an athletic 142 pounds to an overweight 173 pounds in five months. Trustworthy friends called me “fat.”

It wasn’t just me. At hiker reunions, I expected to see bodies like those of marathoners or competitive cyclists, the bodies we had all developed while thru-hiking. Yet most hikers older than age 40 looked dumpy, like me. Veteran hikers offered limited help. “Avoid french fries,” or “Cut your intake,” they advised. As much as I wanted to listen to them, I was listening to my body too, and it said I was hungry!

Authors seemed to have no answer either. A Pacific Crest Trail expert advocated the “raw food diet” on his Web site, but abandoned his next distance hike due to weakness.

An oft-published writer fielded my e-mail inquiry about weight gain this way: “That is one question I wish I could answer. I think [thru-hiking] has wrecked my metabolism.”

Without a coherent nutrition strategy, the only solution for reducing my weight seemed to lie in “upping” my exercise level. So I planned another long hike from Baxter State Park, ME to Cap Gaspé, QC. As soon as my legs loosened up, I trained for six miles daily with a pack, and set out to hike. I never even made it to the summit of Mt. Katahdin.

Everything backfired. I felt so lousy that I quit on the first day, then fell ill for two weeks. Apparently, being overweight was not my only problem.

I returned home in a curious state of shock, denial, and perplexity. A year earlier I had attained the build of an elite athlete, averaging 22 miles per day on mountain trails, completing the A.T. thru-hike in 97 days. Now I felt like an aging boxer, getting knocked out at the opening bell of the first round, not knowing what had hit me.

I did not stumble. I fell. Hard. Was this the dirty little secret of long-distance hiking, falling out of shape off the Trail?”

[HikerMom58]

Humm... don't you think that many factors could go into this person's problem with weight after the hike? First of all, is this person male or female? That could be a factor.
I would get a complete physical, focusing on problems that could increase weight gain for seemingly no reason. I believe that most people's "metabolism" changes due to normal changes in hormones, as we age.

[joshuasdad]

I think that the author of this article would frown on my practice of consuming 2-3 zone bars (about 440 calories) and about a pound of bodyfat during 15-20 mile dayhikes...

[jj2044]

i lost a lot of upper body muscle mass on my hike, from not lifting and that can really effect your post hike resting metabolic rate(RMR). while my legs got in alot better shape, but didnt really gain any muscle(i know this is different for alot of the hiker chicks), even if you go back to the same diet you had before your hike(assuming you were not gaining or lossing weight), if you have lost muscle mass your RMR will be lower, meaning you will gain weight from the normal food you ate pre hike. After my hike there was about 2 weeks that i didnt gain back any weight, after that it started coming back pretty fast till i started lifting again.

[Pedaling Fool]

Humm... don't you think that many factors could go into this person's problem with weight after the hike? First of all, is this person male or female? That could be a factor.
I would get a complete physical, focusing on problems that could increase weight gain for seemingly no reason. I believe that most people's "metabolism" changes due to normal changes in hormones, as we age.

Yes, there are a lot of factors and everyone is different, then you got females, which I won't comment on But the fact is there is only one factor that is ignored, but the most important. Personal Responsibility. People seem to want to blame everything else, they're wrong....Absolutely wrong.

The vast majority of people are fat, because they are LAZY. People need to be told that and when they accept it, change can happen.

[max patch]

I'm certainly not fat but I lost 16 pounds on my hike and gained them all back. Plus a couple more. Now that I am aware of this I hope that next time around I can avoid this. We'll see.

[Spirit Walker]

Regaining the weight lost during a hike is common, but I think it has less to do with metabolic changes than with the attitude we gain during the hike that we can eat anything we want, and as much as we want, without worrying about whether or not it is nutritious or fattening. On a thruhike, all calories are good, the more the merrier. Ice cream, beer, pizza, cookies, candy . . . Bring it on! That kind of freedom to eat doesn't work so well when sedentary.

Also, a lot of hikers really back off on exercise after they get off the trail, which has consequences. You can't eat 3000 calories a day while only burning 2000 and expect to keep your weight stable. After my first thruhike, I had a job that meant I was walking a few miles every day, plus hiking on the weekend, and the weight stayed off.

OTOH, I think there may be some truth to blaming metabolic changes. A lot of hikers lose a lot of weight in the beginning, but as the hike progresses, the weight loss slows and sometimes reverses. Women generally don't lose as much weight as men, while eating and exerting just as much. Some of that comes from figuring out how much food is necessary to keep hunger at bay, and eating it, but some of it has to do with the body becoming more efficient at both how it burns calories during exercise and how it processes food.

What it means is that after your hike, you need to be very careful about how much you eat and you need to keep up the exercise, or, better still, do a variety of exercises so you are using different muscles. Don't let your body become so efficient. Most of all, you have to get rid of the attitude of, "I can eat anything I want, any time I want, without having to think about the consequences."

[yellowsirocco]

i lost a lot of upper body muscle mass on my hike, from not lifting and that can really effect your post hike resting metabolic rate(RMR). while my legs got in alot better shape, but didnt really gain any muscle(i know this is different for alot of the hiker chicks), even if you go back to the same diet you had before your hike(assuming you were not gaining or lossing weight), if you have lost muscle mass your RMR will be lower, meaning you will gain weight from the normal food you ate pre hike. After my hike there was about 2 weeks that i didnt gain back any weight, after that it started coming back pretty fast till i started lifting again.

This is a theory I think has a lot of merit. I basically stopped working my upper body last year and have been putting that time into biking and now my gut is a little larger. I love riding my bike, and am kind of apathetic about upper body exercises so I am happier and enjoying life more.

[Lone Wolf]

thousands of miles of long distance hiking and poor eating habits while hiking contributed to me having a major heart attack and by-pass surgery

[HikerMom58]

I honestly cannot disagree with anyone's reasoning on this subject. Everyone has made some excellent & valid points!! I believe it holds a lot of weight - in this discussion. John- u make a really good point. I agree. I also agree strongly with jj2044. Ur RMR improves the more muscle mass you have in ur body.
You guys probably already know this- but the only true way to calculate your BMI is not by using the hand held BMI calculators that are in some gyms. You have to get in water to get an accurate measure of your BMI (body mass index) which means the percentage of body fat, you have in ur body. I think I heard that President Bush Jr. has/had a really good BMI #.

[HikerMom58]

thousands of miles of long distance hiking and poor eating habits while hiking contributed to me having a major heart attack and by-pass surgery

I'm glad u are ok now. Do you know if you natually have high cholesterol in your blood?

[Malto]

I knew that weight gain was coming after my thru hike. Thought I managed it well. I gained the 13 lbs back that I needed to get back to my ideal weight then added another 7lb. It didn't help that I came to work for a candy company and have a severe weakness for Reese's cups. But hiking fixed it. I pretty much loose a pound a day hiking and yesterday I lost that last pound to get back to target. But the sobering thing is that I hiked over 1200 last year and Reese's cups aside, watch what I eat pretty well. Think about the weight gain without the 1200 miles.

I do think that long distance hiking or even intense weekend hiking to wreck havoc on your metabolism.

[HikerMom58]

Whoo hoo... good for you gg-man loosing that last lb. I wanted to talk to you about living in Hershey PA... love that place! Anyway, I'm glad to see you used the word intense weekend hiking ... I was thinking more along the lines of "superhuman" weekend hike. Glad u made it home safe and sound.

[treesloth]

OK, for the record, I'm spitballing here; just throwing out some ideas as to hiking and nutrition.

I've yet to do a thru (it's on my list for 2014) but I've often wondered if the subject matter at hand is due (in some level) to Inflammation. Not the type you get in your knees that you take Ibuprofen for, but systemic inflammation. Details that we know about it are emerging, but there are many who believe that all the ultra-processed carbs that we eat, along with mass amounts of high fructose CS (in almost everything that's sweet) produce high insulin levels that make and keep us fat. Now, during a LD hike, those carbs are being burned off, but it's all that insulin is still being produced and creating hyperglycemia. Look at what Lone Wolf just said: Thousands of hiking miles and a big ol' heart attack. Was LW inflaming himself on a daily basis, even tho you'd think he was burning off the carbs and cholesterol? This is said in absence of knowing anything else about his health and health habits.

One of the major theories behind this is that our genes have not had a chance to get used to major amounts of refined carbohydrates, eg pasta, cereal, potato chips. Wheat based foods were just introduced to our bodies 10,000 years ago. (I'm not totally sold on this, it's just an offered theory.) So, I'm guessing that even though you're burning off those carbs in an efficient manner on a LD hike, you're still producing craptons of Insulin in your body and inflaming yourself on a regular basis. Overexertion can also raise your insulin levels, but the wild card is that low-intensity exercise can lower them. So, I'm not sure how all this fits into place with eating a bunch of junk when you're hiking... Who the hell wants to search out whole/healthy foods on a hike? Well, our ancestors did it when they migrated places. They foraged nuts and berries, ate fish and lean meats. They'd grow or forage vegetables, and sometimes find seasonably available honey. This is paraphrased.

Inflammation exists below our pain threshold so we don't really know when it's happening. Are we trashing our bodies by eating whatever the hell we want while hiking, but lulled into a false sense of security that it's all good because we're not gaining any weight? Maybe that has something to do with so many gaining their weight back (and often then some) after the LD hike? I know not. I can only guess.

Disclosure, I'm also reading a book at the moment: Wellman - Live longer by controlling Inflammation, by Dr. Graham Simpson. Very enlightening, tho trying to adopt a paleolithic diet is a PITA at best.. No beer? C'mon. There are a ton of other books on it as well. Do your own research. I may be wrong on about 95% of what I just said. :-)

[Slo-go'en]

I don't know if older people gain wieght because their metabolism changes or the fact that most sit around and eat too much. The high fractose corn syrup they put in everything these days doesn't help either. I started holding the line on weight gain simply by no longer eating fast food a couple times a week and eliminating soft drinks from my diet.

I belive weight gain after a long distance hike is due to your body working with a calorie deficentcy for so long. You've long since lost all fat reserves and your body wants you to build them back up again. But once you do, it's really hard to stop eating so much. And now that your back to sitting around and eating too much, your weight really explodes.

This is part of the feast/famine cycle. After a famine, your body wants to fatten up during the feast time to be ready for the next famine. Remember, it's only been in recent times we've had abundent food available year round. These days your body is getting ready for the next famine, which never comes.

[Oak88]

http://www.whiteblaze.net/forum/show...t=#post1383872

[FarmerChef]

Oooh, I smell an excellent thesis coming on

Wouldn't it be cool if some graduate student studied the starting BF% of a group of hikers and then measured it periodically up the trail, culminating with their finishing BF%? It would be very interesting to see how body composition changes as the hike time/distance progress. One step further would be to track the diet as well pre, during and post hike.

As for weight gain/physical conditioning post hike, I can certainly say that I always enjoy a nice "bump" down in BF% during each hike, usually to the tune of around 5% (I'm normally around 9 or 10 percent). The hard part, is fighting the hunger pangs once I'm back to my normal routine which already includes 1.5 to 2.5 hours of running and weights per day. To me (unscientific and highly personalized best guess here) the hardest part about maintaining my level of fitness in between hikes is that the amount of physical activity I can do in the gym or out running pales in comparison to the day-long intensity of carrying 25 pounds on my back for 18 or 20 miles. Perhaps if I ran a marathon every single day I might maintain that elite physical athlete look. Oh wait, I WOULD be an elite physical athlete at that point

What I'm trying to say is there are two chief enemies fighting against our desire to remain fit post LD hike: hunger and exercise. Our hunger is out of this world as our body has tuned itself to constantly ingesting more energy and our metabolic pathways are keyed off a need to quickly process it to make it accessible for hours of sustained exercise. As I said before, we exercise for 10 to 12 or more hours per day while hiking. Then we return to an hour run 3-5 days a week and sitting at a desk for 50 to 60 hours.

Weight gain/loss is pretty simple (mind you, I'm not at all suggesting it's easy...) - calories in versus calories out. What we eat can help avoid eating too many calories but, at the end of the day, if we eat more than we burn we're going to put some of those extra calories away into either muscle (assuming we tore muscle fibers) or fat (more likely since lifting a Big Gulp to our lips requires a lot less effort). I've said it before and I'll say it again here, a highly-refined, high carbohydrate diet is responsible for much of the diabetes and heart disease the world over, due in no small part to it's ability to leave us feeling just as hungry as before we ate the "biggie" fries, Big Mac and large Coke. Whole foods make us feel full faster, especially proteins and fats. On the trail we (including myself) love to eat the carbs. But sustaining that off the trail is a prescription for weight gain, in my opinion.

[Rasty]

OK, for the record, I'm spitballing here; just throwing out some ideas as to hiking and nutrition.

One of the major theories behind this is that our genes have not had a chance to get used to major amounts of refined carbohydrates, eg pasta, cereal, potato chips. Wheat based foods were just introduced to our bodies 10,000 years ago. (I'm not totally sold on this, it's just an offered theory.) So, I'm guessing that even though you're burning off those carbs in an efficient manner on a LD hike, you're still producing craptons of Insulin in your body and inflaming yourself on a regular basis. Overexertion can also raise your insulin levels, but the wild card is that low-intensity exercise can lower them. So, I'm not sure how all this fits into place with eating a bunch of junk when you're hiking... Who the hell wants to search out whole/healthy foods on a hike? Well, our ancestors did it when they migrated places. They foraged nuts and berries, ate fish and lean meats. They'd grow or forage vegetables, and sometimes find seasonably available honey. This is paraphrased.

:-)

Another theory is that we are eating under fermented bread products. In the last 50 years we went from fermentation times of 10 plus hours to less then 1 hour for much of the commercial products. Real bread at the turn of the 20th century was composed of much more preferment (Sour Dough, Old Dough Addition, Biga, Poolish, etc.) Many Rye recipes called for up to 50% sour. It's a good theory as far as making bread with a 5% ratio of yeast rises so fast that the flour never really goes through the fermentation process. Old world breads would use yeast ratio's in the 1/2 to 1% number. Some with gluten allergies are able to eat bread without reactions when made in the old way.

We didn't start having gluten allergies until the industrialization of the food manufaturing process.

[Karma13]

That's interesting, Rasty!

The information is a little technical for this non-baker, but I'm very curious. Are there any breads available available with that higher fermentation? ie, Is rye bread better?

[Rasty]

That's interesting, Rasty!

The information is a little technical for this non-baker, but I'm very curious. Are there any breads available available with that higher fermentation? ie, Is rye bread better?

Depends of how it is made. Rye can be great or cheap grocery store wonder bread. Many smaller community bakeries still make bread the old way. Below is a very brief recipe showing the difference.

Ingredient................Garbage Bread ............Real Bread

Preferment Flour ...........................................25%
Preferment water ...........................................25%
Flour, Wheat ...........100% ............................100%
Water .........................50% .............................60%
Yeast ...........................5% ...............................½%
Salt ...............................2% ...............................2%
Shortening ..................5%
Sugar ...........................5%

Note –
1) Baking percentages calculate all ingredients as a percentage of the weight of the flour.
2) The Garbage bread would be complete from mixing to baking in less then 2 hours.
3) The Real bread example would have a preferment that is 12 hours old at the minimum. True sour dough is going to be refreshed every 24 to 48 hours and could be years old.