6/21/07 9 pm

Solstice.

Also, for those of you who keep track of obscure sub-cultural holidays, among long-distance hikers it was World Hike Naked Day, a day which I failed to observe during my abortive 1998 thru-hike only because my hiking partner had wound up behind me a few days earlier. I taunted him in the shelter logs for a couple of days until he pulled a 30-mile day to catch up and in the process messed up his toes pretty badly. So I owed him some time off the trail.

I'm thinking of the hike a lot these days because this is the first time since then I've really lived with hunger. (During my pregnancy, it was more nausea than hunger until I put myself on the Brewer diet.) On the hike, I had to train myself to eat long before I felt that skritchy physical sensation of hunger because I had such a calorie deficit and was demanding so much of my body that if hunger set in I could have a really hard time, and I was alone much of the day, on mountains. Also, I was keeping up with men--many of them 4 or 5 years younger--who hiked the same distance in much less time, which meant I was really not resting as much as was maybe ideal. So I trained myself to notice early signs of blood sugar flagging and eat then.

In the initial week or two of hiking, I actually didn't have the stomach capacity. I'd gone to a nutritionist and read a slew of stuff and measured out each meal into ziploc bags and I would find that I literally had no room for them. I remember these two 18 year old kids, who were hiking about 300 miles for a senior project, egging me on to finish a pot of Lipton instant rice dinner. I had to eat so many candy bars a day it actually made me sick of sugar--among cheap commercial candy, Mounds and Almond Joy have some of the highest fat-to-sugar ratios out there, if you're ever find yourself interested in this sort of thing. I still relied on stops in the little towns along the route to address the calorie deficit. When thru-hikers come to town, it's pretty normal to start with a pint of Ben and Jerry's as a snack, move on to a pizza and then go looking for your next meal an hour later. I ate like this for three months and lost five pounds, which included all of my upper-body fat.

It won't surprise you that unless they keep doing something else pretty highly active (my hiking partner now does long-distance bike races), former thru-hikers are generally overweight. Once you've starved, it's hard to not be a little weird about food, even if no trauma is involved in the starvation. I now weigh more than 70 pounds over what I weighed at the end of my hike. Before the hike, I weighed the same amount at 27 that I weighed at 17.

So now I'm reacquainting myself with feeling hungry, not just between-meals hungry, but actually losing-fat hungry. It's sort of interesting. It's like I used to stop at a certain point on the way to hungry, and now I stop a little further down that path. And I learning to notice that I'm satisfied at an earlier point, too. I don't need to feel full, I just need to feel not-hungry. It's an intensive re-education about occupying my body.