A few months after I became a hiking fiend in the summer of 2004, people started
\ntelling me, “Tom, you’re getting skinny.” Well, a few did. Often they’d ask me
\nwhat happened.<\/p>\n
What I told people was that Tony Soprano convinced me I needed some exercise.
\nOne of the cool things about “The Sopranos” is how the show humanizes its characters
\nby such things as showing Mafia kingpins in their underwear. Just about every
\nepisode features some shot of Tony with his gut hanging over his boxer shorts,
\nout his bathrobe, etc. I started noticing that my gut looked a lot like his
\ngut, and given that I saw a poor future in bettering myself by murdering my
\nrivals, I needed to resort to more conventional means of self-improvement.<\/p>\n
A few months after this epiphany, my wife and I moved to a cottage on a hill
\noverlooking Silicon Valley. I started taking walks for exercise on the up-and-down
\ncountry roads nearby and noticed right away that walking uphill worked up one
\nhell of a sweat.<\/p>\n
Pretty soon I was going out on morning walks and working up a hellacious sweat
\nevery time. Then I got me a fanny pack with twin water bottles, and I noticed
\nI had to tighten it a little bit more every few days. This got me down from
\nmy top weight of around 207 to about 190, which is where all my previous weight-loss
\nsagas stalled.<\/p>\n
Around this time I made up my mind to really get serious about losing some
\nweight, which meant the dreaded Going on a Diet. Except I didn’t really go on
\na diet, I just cut the ridiculously high calories out of the diet I already
\nhad.<\/p>\n
I called it the No Cokes, No Cookies diet. It worked like this: A 12-ounce
\nCoke has about 150 calories. One of my wife’s phantasmagorically good oatmeal
\nchocolate chip monster cookies might have as much as 350 calories. Every day
\nI would eat one of these with my lunch and wash it down with a Coke. That’s
\n500 calories right there. I decided to switch to water and baby carrots, which
\nworked worked out to about 100 calories if I really got the munchies.<\/p>\n
Then I switched from a relatively easy walk over five up-and-down miles to
\na six-mile sole-killer that was three miles downhill, then three miles up with
\nabout 800 feet of elevation gain. The combination of cutting calories and busting
\nbutt on hills started melting pounds like nobody’s business.<\/p>\n
All told, I lost 37 pounds in less than six months.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t exactly sure how I did it, till I started researching some basic numbers
\nabout weight loss. The essential number is 3500 — that’s how many calories
\nmust be burned to get rid of a single pound of body fat.<\/p>\n
How much effort would it require to burn off that many calories? For me, a
\nhalf-hour hike burns about 250 calories (the more you weigh, the more energy
\nis needed to propel your body forward, so people who weigh 140 lbs. burn far
\nfewer calories per hour than those who weigh 200). That means 14 half-hour hikes
\nto lose one pound. Losing 30 pounds means 420 half-hour hikes. Daunting, I know.<\/p>\n
But check this out: If I cut the Cokes and cookies out of my diet (400 calories
\nafter subtracting 100 for my baby carrots) and hike just a half-hour every day
\nI’m creating a deficit of 650 calories a day, which means I lose the first pound
\nin five days. I”m on track to lose 4-6 pounds a month and upwards of 50 pounds
\nin a year — all by adding one half-hour of physical activity and cutting just
\ntwo food items out of my diet.<\/p>\n
Taking the weight off, as anybody can tell you, is far easier than keeping
\nit off. I’ve gained back about 5 of the pounds I lost, which puts me at 175,
\nwhich is a bit heavier than I should be but leaves me with a small storehouse
\nof body fat that’ll come in handy if I ever get stranded in the woods with no
\nfood for a week. My weight stays pretty stable so long as I kick myself in the
\nbutt every few days and take some tough hikes on the hill down the road. As
\nsoon as I start letting up, I can feel my jeans get tighter around the waist.<\/p>\n
I never made major traction on weight loss till I changed my diet. Exercise Another thing I discovered in my weight-loss research is that a healthy diet A few months after I became a hiking fiend in the summer of 2004, people started telling me, “Tom, you’re getting skinny.” Well, a few did. Often they’d ask me what happened. What I told people was that Tony Soprano…<\/p>\n
\nis physically challenging, but it’s easier to get into because even if it doesn’t
\nfeels good doing it, if feels great<\/em> having done it. Giving up tasty
\nfood, however, is pure sacrifice with no feel-goodness at all, except maybe
\nwhen you weigh yourself.<\/p>\n
\nand regular exercise can add like 10 years to your life. Physically active people
\ndon’t get nearly as sick in their waning years, and are far less likely to suffer
\nfrom chronic, debilitating conditions that leave them bedridden for months on
\nend. Fitness is like a savings account in which a few hours a week of sacrifice
\npay you back in years in your retirement. A far better deal than your 401(k).
\nYou can’t spend money when you’re dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"