xrayextra
03-09-2014, 14:30
Hi everyone! I thru-hiked last year and lost 65 lbs (233 lbs to 168 lbs).
About a month prior to my trip I began to supplement my diet with 1000 mg of Vitamin C daily (the body can't process more than 1000 mg per day). I continued this on my AT hike.
I learned later that Vitamin C helps convert fat to energy. Although I went from basically couch potatoe straight to the trail, I attribute the rapid weight loss to the assist from Vitamin C.
I know I still would have lost weight but vitamin C helped speed up the process. I dropped 30 by the time I hit Pearisburg, 40 lbs by Harper's Ferry, and 55 by Delaware Water Gap.
I also recommend taking glucosamine, an amino acid, for your knees and joints (although I didn't take it on the trail I wish I had; I'm taking it now).
One other thing you need to be aware of. If your sweat begins to smell like amonia, it means you're burning muscle; you've run out of fat to burn so pile on the carbs!
Good luck hikers!
Trail Ponderer
03-09-2014, 22:15
Hi Xrayextra
Welcome to Whiteblaze and congratulations on your thruhike. You have got to be the youngest thruhiker ever only being a 1 year old. Are you a baby elephant? Congratulations on the weight loss but 233 lbs. or even 168 lbs. for a one year old is ridiculous. Your poor Mama.
You say you went from couch potato to the trail, don't you mean crib potato?
Glucosamine for your knees? Really is this necessary, your knees and joints are brand new. Did you crawl the AT?
Next time, you smell ammonia... check your diaper.:D
Sarcasm the elf
03-09-2014, 22:49
Hi Xrayextra
Welcome to Whiteblaze and congratulations on your thruhike. You have got to be the youngest thruhiker ever only being a 1 year old. Are you a baby elephant? Congratulations on the weight loss but 233 lbs. or even 168 lbs. for a one year old is ridiculous. Your poor Mama.
You say you went from couch potato to the trail, don't you mean crib potato?
Glucosamine for your knees? Really is this necessary, your knees and joints are brand new. Did you crawl the AT?
Next time, you smell ammonia... check your diaper.:D
There was glitch a while back where most new members showed up as being a single digit age. Not sure whatever came of it.
Pedaling Fool
03-10-2014, 08:25
I lost 50lbs by Damascus and then settled out. I did NOT take near the amount of Vit C as you.
Furthermore, if you look thru threads asking how much weight one lost on a thru-hike you'll see losing big weight on a thru-hike is the norm.
This is a very interesting article on supplements and it talks very specifically on Vit C. It's a long article, but it does give one insight on how vitamins became fadish. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/ar...ements/277947/ (http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitamin-myth-why-we-think-we-need-supplements/277947/)
Excerpt:
"...A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world's greatest quack.
In 1931, Linus Pauling published a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society titled "The Nature of the Chemical Bond."Before publication, chemists knew of two types of chemicalbonds: ionic, where one atom gives up an electron to another; and covalent, where atoms share electrons. Pauling argued thatit wasn't that simple -- electron sharing was somewhere between ionic and covalent. Pauling's idea revolutionized the field, marrying quantum physics with chemistry. His concept was so revolutionary in fact that when the journal editor received the manuscript, he couldn't find anyone qualified to review it. When Albert Einstein was asked what he thought of Pauling's work, he shrugged his shoulders. "It was too complicated for me," he said. For this single paper, Pauling received the Langmuir Prize as the most outstanding young chemist in the United States, became the youngest person elected to the National Academy of Sciences, was made a full professor at Caltech, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was 30 years old.
In 1949, Pauling published a paper in Science titled "Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease." At the time, scientists knew that hemoglobin (the protein in blood that transports oxygen) crystallized in the veins of people with sickle-cell anemia, causing joint pain, blood clots, and death. But they didn't know why. Pauling was the first to show that sickle hemoglobin had a slightly different electrical charge--a quality that dramatically affected how the hemoglobin reacted with oxygen. His finding gave birth to the field of molecular biology.
In 1951, Pauling published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled "The Structure of Proteins."
Scientists knew that proteins were composed of a series of amino acids. Pauling proposed that proteins also had a secondary structure determined by how they folded upon themselves. He called one configuration the alpha helix--later used by James Watson and Francis Crick to explain the structure of DNA.
In 1961, Pauling collected blood from gorillas, chimpanzees, and monkeys at the San Diego Zoo. He wanted to see whether mutations in hemoglobin could be used as a kind of evolutionary clock. Pauling showed that humans had diverged from gorillas about 11 million years ago, much earlier than scientists had suspected. A colleague later remarked, "At one stroke he united the fields of paleontology, evolutionary biology, and molecular biology."
Pauling's accomplishments weren't limited to science. Beginning in the 1950s--and for the next forty years -- he was the world's most recognized peace activist. Pauling opposed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, declined Robert Oppenheimer's offer to work on the Manhattan Project, stood up to Senator Joseph McCarthy by refusing a loyalty oath, opposed nuclear proliferation, publicly debated nuclear-arms hawks like Edward Teller, forced the government to admit that nuclear explosions could damage human genes, convinced other Nobel Prize winners to oppose the Vietnam War, and wrote the best-selling book No More War! Pauling's efforts led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In 1962, he won the Nobel Peace Prize--the first person ever to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.
In addition to his election to the National Academy of Sciences, two Nobel Prizes, the National Medal of Science, and the Medal for Merit (which was awarded by the president of the United States), Pauling received honorary degrees from Cambridge University, the University of London, and the University of Paris. In 1961, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine's Men of the Year issue, hailed as one of the greatest scientists who had ever lived.
Then all the rigor, hard work, and hard thinking that had made Linus Pauling a legend disappeared. In the words of a colleague, his "fall was as great as any classic tragedy."
The turning point came in March 1966, when Pauling was 65 years old. He had just received the Carl Neuberg Medal. "During a talk in New York City," recalled Pauling, "I mentioned how much pleasure I took in reading about the discoveries made by scientists in their various investigations of the nature of the world, and stated that I hoped I could live another twenty-five years in order to continue to have this pleasure. On my return to California I received a letter from a biochemist, Irwin Stone, who had been at the talk. He wrote that if I followed his recommendation of taking 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C, I would live not only 25 years longer, but probably more." Stone, who referred to himself as Dr. Stone, had spent two years studying chemistry in college. Later, he received an honorary degree from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and a "PhD" from Donsbach University, a non-accredited correspondence school in Southern California.
Pauling followed Stone's advice. "I began to feel livelier and healthier," he said. "In particular, the severe colds I had suffered several times a year all my life no longer occurred. After a few years, I increased my intake of vitamin C to ten times, then twenty times, and then three hundred times the RDA: now 18,000 milligrams per day."
From that day forward, people would remember Linus Pauling for one thing: vitamin C.
In 1970, Pauling published Vitamin C and the Common Cold, urging the public to take 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C every day (about 50 times the recommended daily allowance). Pauling believed that the common cold would soon be a historical footnote. "It will take decades to eradicate the common cold completely," he wrote, "but it can, I believe, be controlled entirely in the United States and some other countries within a few years. I look forward to witnessing this step toward a better world." Pauling's book became an instant best seller. Paperback versions were printed in 1971 and 1973, and an expanded edition titled Vitamin C, the Common Cold and the Flu, published three years later, promised to ward off a predicted swine flu pandemic. Sales of vitamin C doubled, tripled, and quadrupled. Drugstores couldn't keep up with demand. By the mid-1970s, 50 million Americans were following Pauling's advice. Vitamin manufacturers called it "the Linus Pauling effect."
Scientists weren't as enthusiastic. On December 14, 1942, about thirty years before Pauling published his first book, Donald Cowan, Harold Diehl, and Abe Baker, from the University of Minnesota, published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled "Vitamins for the Prevention of Colds." The authors concluded, "Under the conditions of this controlled study, in which 980 colds were treated . . . there is no indication that vitamin C alone, an antihistamine alone, or vitamin C plus an antihistamine have any important effect on the duration or severity of infections of the upper respiratory tract."
Other studies followed. After Pauling's pronouncement, researchers at the University of Maryland gave 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C every day for three weeks to eleven volunteers and a sugar pill (placebo) to ten others. Then they infected volunteers with a common cold virus. All developed cold symptoms of similar duration. At the University of Toronto, researchers administered vitamin C or placebo to 3,500 volunteers. Again, vitamin C didn't prevent colds, even in those receiving as much as 2,000 milligrams a day. In 2002, researchers in the Netherlands administered multivitamins or placebo to more than 600 volunteers. Again, no difference. At least 15 studies have now shown that vitamin C doesn't treat the common cold. As a consequence, neither the FDA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Dietetic Association, the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, nor the Department of Health and Human Services recommend supplemental vitamin C for the prevention or treatment of colds.
Although study after study showed that he was wrong, Pauling refused to believe it, continuing to promote vitamin C in speeches, popular articles, and books. When he occasionally appeared before the media with obvious cold symptoms, he said he was suffering from allergies.
Then Linus Pauling upped the ante. He claimed that vitamin C not only prevented colds; it cured cancer.
In 1971, Pauling received a letter from Ewan Cameron, a Scottish surgeon from a tiny hospital outside Glasgow. Cameron wrote that cancer patients who were treated with ten grams of vitamin C every day had fared better than those who weren't. Pauling was ecstatic. He decided to publish Cameron's findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Pauling assumed that as a member of the academy he could publish a paper in PNAS whenever he wanted; only three papers submitted by academy members had been rejected in more than half a century. Pauling's paper was rejected anyway, further tarnishing his reputation among scientists. Later, the paper was published in Oncology, a journal for cancer specialists. When researchers evaluated the data, the flaw became obvious: the cancer victims Cameron had treated with vitamin C were healthier at the start of therapy, so their outcomes were better. After that, scientists no longer took Pauling's claims about vitamins seriously.
But Linus Pauling still had clout with the media. In 1971, he declared that vitamin C would cause a 10 percent decrease in deaths from cancer. In 1977, he went even further. "My present estimate is that a decrease of 75 percent can be achieved with vitamin C alone," he wrote, "and a further decrease by use of other nutritional supplements." With cancer in their rearview mirror, Pauling predicted, Americans would live longer, healthier lives. "Life expectancy will be 100 to 110 years," he said, "and in the course of time, the maximum age might be 150 years."
Cancer victims now had reason for hope. Wanting to participate in the Pauling miracle, they urged their doctors to give them massive doses of vitamin C. "For about seven or eight years, we were getting a lot of requests from our families to use high-dose vitamin C," recalls John Maris, chief of oncology and director of the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "We struggled with that. They would say, 'Doctor, do you have a Nobel Prize?' "
Blindsided, cancer researchers decided to test Pauling's theory. Charles Moertel, of the Mayo Clinic, evaluated 150 cancer victims: half received ten grams of vitamin C a day and half didn't. The vitamin C-treated group showed no difference in symptoms or mortality.
Moertel concluded, "We were unable to show a therapeutic benefit of high-dose vitamin C." Pauling was outraged. He wrote an angry letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, which had published the study, claiming that Moertel had missed the point. Of course vitamin C hadn't worked: Moertel had treated patients who had already received chemotherapy. Pauling claimed that vitamin C worked only if cancer victims had received no prior chemotherapy.
Bullied, Moertel performed a second study; the results were the same. Moertel concluded, "Among patients with measurable disease, none had objective improvement. It can be concluded that high-dose vitamin C therapy is not effective against advanced malignant disease regardless of whether the patient had received any prior chemotherapy." For most doctors, this was the end of it. But not for Linus Pauling. He was simply not to be contradicted. Cameron observed, "I have never seen him so upset. He regards the whole affair as a personal attack on his integrity." Pauling thought Moertel's study was a case of "fraud and deliberate misrepresentation." He consulted lawyers about suing Moertel, but they talked him out of it.
Subsequent studies have consistently shown that vitamin C doesn't treat cancer."
One of the hikers I met on the trail was a nutritionist and told me that it sped up the weight loss process by converting the fat to energy faster than if I hadn't taken vitamin c supplements.Like I said above, this is totally untrue as long as you're getting your RDA of vitamin C. xray, how about not spreading misinformation?
Bagge Pants
03-10-2014, 11:17
I was gonna say vitamin supplements don't really do anything for you then noticed someone above already stated it...
With that said, chopped pine needles in a cup of hot water brewed as tea has more vitamin C than a glass of OJ and your body will actually use it properly, unlike a supplement vitamin.
I have used glucosamine with great results tho. :) maybe it was a placebo, maybe not
I have used glucosamine with great results tho. :) maybe it was a placebo, maybe notThere actually is good evidence that glucosamine can help knee pain, at least for people with osteoarthritis. I'm not sure if anyone's shown if it helps with the sorts of hiking-caused pains that AT hikers get.
And don't knock placebo effects! Placebos work for a lot of conditions. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/enhancing-the-placebo/
Hot Flash
03-10-2014, 14:14
Hi everyone! I thru-hiked last year and lost 65 lbs (233 lbs to 168 lbs).
About a month prior to my trip I began to supplement my diet with 1000 mg of Vitamin C daily (the body can't process more than 1000 mg per day). I continued this on my AT hike.
I learned later that Vitamin C helps convert fat to energy. Although I went from basically couch potatoe straight to the trail, I attribute the rapid weight loss to the assist from Vitamin C.
I know I still would have lost weight but vitamin C helped speed up the process. I dropped 30 by the time I hit Pearisburg, 40 lbs by Harper's Ferry, and 55 by Delaware Water Gap.
I also recommend taking glucosamine, an amino acid, for your knees and joints (although I didn't take it on the trail I wish I had; I'm taking it now).
One other thing you need to be aware of. If your sweat begins to smell like amonia, it means you're burning muscle; you've run out of fat to burn so pile on the carbs!
Good luck hikers!
So much misinformation here that I will only address the repeated myths surrounding vitamin C. It doesn't prevent colds. It doesn't make you burn fat or lose weight. It doesn't prevent or cure cancer. If you don't have a severe deficiency you're just pissing money away, literally. Not only that, megadoses can give you kidney stones.
You lost weight because the calories your body required to maintain its weight were more than the calories you shoved in your face.
With that said, chopped pine needles in a cup of hot water brewed as tea has more vitamin C than a glass of OJ and your body will actually use it properly, unlike a supplement vitamin.
+1. I always chew on pine needles while on my jogs or hiking trips. A great and all natural source of vitamin C. Especially this time of year, with the new growth!
Affirmative
03-13-2014, 23:25
I'll be supplementing with Fish Oil (with Omega 3 and vitamin D3), L-Glutamine (which actually is an amino acid but not deemed a particularly essential one), and possibly Resveratrol.
Fish Oil helps me not feel like an old man even though I'm 24.
L-Glutamine i'm not too serious about, but it is what it is - a SUPPLEMENT
Resveratrol because it has anti-inflammatory properties and I won't be carrying ibuprofen anyway.
I think I actually may take in too much vitamin C while attempting my thru hike. I'm packing a lot of those EmergenC packets, the ones with glucosamine.
May consider tossing in Magnesium Citrate tabs since I won't be getting much leafy greens. But 3 supplements are already a lot...