Month: March 2018

A Diet That Works

One of my resolutions for 2018 is — this won’t surprise anyone who sees me from time to time — lose weight.   I’ve gained some, OK, a lot, since I finished hiking the Appalachian in July 2015.

That’s one of the things I liked best about hiking every day, month after month.  You could eat as much as you wanted of anything you wanted and still not gain weight.  In fact, you lost weight.

After those first few weeks, hiking out of Georgia into the North Carolina mountains, I was always hungry. We all were. Thru-hikers burn up to 6,000 calories a day, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. We couldn’t carry enough food to replace that many calories but brother, sister, we tried to make up for it when we got somewhere where we could eat.

Here are a couple examples of what I’m talking about:

Near Wallingford, VT, the Hiking Vikings, Bruin, and I walked an extra mile to have breakfast at Qu’s Whistle Stop.  It wasn’t an eat-all-you can place but it was hiker friendly — they served generous portions. I ate two eggs; sausage; hash browns; toast and jelly; two pancakes with maple syrup; orange juice; and plenty of coffee.

Breakfast desert
Breakfast dessert

And a banana split.

Two weeks later, I arrived at an eat-all-you-can restaurant right beside on the trail, at Pinkham Notch in New Hampshire.  And I ate all I could: two scrambled eggs, two servings of hash browns, a blueberry muffin, a sausage patty, 10 pieces of bacon, two glasses of orange juice, two glasses of apple juice, a bowl of fruit, and three cups of coffee. Oh, and four pancakes.

Even so, when I arrived in Monson, ME, the last town before Mt. Katahdin and the end of the hike, I was down 32 pounds, to an even 170.  I hadn’t had much to eat for several days, trying to make it to Monson without getting off the trail to resupply, and delaying the end of my hike.

On July 7th, the day I hiked into Monson, I was down to one piece of hard candy. I got up at 4 a.m. that day, packed, and was on the move at 4:50 a.m. I arrived at Maine 15, the Monson trailhead, at 1:30 p.m., after hiking 17.9 miles. Beside the piece of hard candy, which I had eaten for breakfast, I had traded a SoBo –a south bound thru-hiker — a dozen water purification pills for the three small packs of nuts.

That’s how you lose weight.

April 10, 2015, less than two months into the hike, "36" pants are too big.
April 10, 2015, less than two months into the hike, size 36-pants are too big.

When I started the hike, on Feb. 15, 2015, my belly hung over the top of my size 38-inch waist pants. After four weeks I switched to a pair of size 36s. Later I moved down to size 34s and by the time I finished the hike they were too big.

So how much weight — fat — have I gained?

I’m not going to say yet.  Let’s just say I need to go on a long, long hike.

Coming Monday: Be Good Or Else

 

The Rabbit Doctor

After Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon, performed the world’s first successful human-to-human heart transplant in December 1967 I was assigned by my newspaper to do a Q. and A. with Charlotte’s foremost cardiologist, Dr. Francis Robicsek.

When would he and his colleagues begin doing heart transplants?

For a while it didn’t look like I would get to pose a single question because Dr. Robicsek imposed an unacceptable condition: He would not agree to an interview unless he was allowed to review the Q. and A. before publication, and make changes.

I said no to that demand, and he said no to the interview.

Dr. Francis Robicsek
Dr. Francis Robicsek

But the newspaper I worked for then, The Charlotte News, said yes. We wouldn’t be giving up editorial control over a story, the editor said. He said Dr. Robicsek  would just be editing his own words, his tape recorded answers.

I didn’t like that, but I wasn’t in charge.

When I went back to Dr. Robicsek to tell him the newspaper had caved [Oh, I know. I didn’t use that exact word. But that’s what The News did.] he imposed a second condition: he wanted control over the headline, too. No paper worth a flip would agree to such a thing but Dr. Robicsek was adamant.

I ask him why.  This is what he told me:

“A friend of mine, a doctor, experimented for years on rabbits and made some great discovery — I forget what it was,” Robicsek said in a heavy foreign accent. He had fled from Hungry in 1956, after Hungry’s unsuccessful revolt against the Soviet Union. “The local newspaper interviewed him and took his picture in a room full of rabbits. Rabbits all around. He was smart, he make them show him the story before they printed it. But he forgot about the headline.”

Bugs“Do you know what the headline said?” Dr. Robicsek asked. “The headline said, ‘What’s Up, Doc?'”

Postscript: The News agreed to the headline condition, too. For what it’s worth, Dr. Robicsek made no changes in the Q. and A. or the headline.

Coming Friday: A Diet That Works