“There’s a big payoff as I look down from a ridge or a summit to the mesas below or across the undulating ridges of mountains.”
Above the Arctic Circle in northern Alaska sit the Arrigetch Peaks, a cluster of rugged granite spires in the Endicott Mountains in the seven hundred-mile, mostly uninhabited Brooks Mountain Range, which is believed to be about 126 million years old. The name Arrigetch in the Inupiat language means “fingers of the outstretched hand.” Fifty-seven-year-old Jamie Ash looks out over the expansive tundra, admiring its peaking fall colors. She trained seven months for this hike.
Back home among the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the north-central region of New Mexico, Jamie colors interior plaster using imported pigments to make a wall finish unique to northern New Mexico. She owns Handmade Plaster Pigments in the small town of Taos, which is named after the Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States. Jamie has been living in Taos since 1985.
As an eighteen-year-old preparing to go to college, Jamie weighed 165 pounds. “I’m five feet, two and a half inches, so that made me a pretty round person,” she says. “In 1979, I was an outlier.” Most of her peers were a lot smaller than her. Not wanting to be so self-conscious about her body, she tried to lose weight, getting down to 135 pounds over eight weeks through exercising and eating only 900 calories per day. She got new clothes and felt attractive. Once she got to college, however, she stopped exercising and took advantage of the unlimited amount of food in the dining hall. The weight came back within two months.
When she was forty-three years old and 172 pounds, Jamie tried to lose weight again. “I knew I had gained weight since I could no longer button the top of my pants,” she says. “My mother had been big, maybe two hundred pounds. When I saw 172 on the scale, I could see two hundred not far away, and I was horrified at that possible trajectory.” Jamie joined a gym, started walking on a treadmill, and stopped eating sugar. She got down to the mid-150s. “I stopped trying to lose weight, but didn’t think about maintaining,” she says. Exercise slowly dropped away, dessert slowly came back and, within six months, so did the pounds.
When she was fifty-three, Jamie was looking for a vacation within a day’s drive of Taos. During yearly trips to the Oregon Coast, she had flown over Utah and was awed by its red rock formations. “Each time I saw the land morph from green and brown to red, I thought about going back,” she says. Never much of an exerciser or an outdoors person, she planned a hiking trip to Utah anyway.
***
In a review of the data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), scientists at Stanford University’s School of Medicine compared obesity, physical activity, and caloric intake in US adults from 1988 to 2010.139 They found a significant association between the level of physical activity in the population—but not daily caloric intake—and the increases in body mass index and waist circumference. The proportion of adults who did not exercise increased dramatically from 1988 to 2010—19.1 percent to 51.7 percent among women, and 11.4 percent to 43.5 percent among men. Finding no evidence that average daily caloric intake had increased over that time period, despite a continued upward swing in obesity, the scientists’ claimed that their findings do not support the popular notion that the rise in obesity in the US is primarily a result of consuming more daily calories. It’s not a coincidence that two-thirds of the US adult population is overweight or obese and less than one-fifth of the population exercises on a regular basis.
Yet, many popular weight-loss plans emphasize diet more than exercise. We are told to eat this, not that. However, emphasizing diet over exercise misses an important point—cutting calories and eating a more nutritious diet does not make you fitter and doesn’t do much to reset your metabolism. Nutrition doesn’t give your muscles or your cardiovascular system a stimulus to which to adapt. Only exercise can provide that stimulus, sculpting your body and making you fitter and healthier. And because you must eat enough to maintain your resting metabolic rate (around 1,300 to 1,500 calories per day) so you can continue to live, caloric restriction is limited (you can’t cut your calories to only 100 per day, after all). By contrast, exercise is virtually unlimited. It’s hard to overdose on exercise.
One of the major reasons why exercise is the main driver of metabolic control and thus of successful weight maintenance is because of the potent effect exercise has on your muscles—specifically, the mitochondria deep inside your muscles, which are the microscopic factories responsible for aerobic metabolism. Mitochondria are full of enzymes—the factory workers—that catalyze the many chemical reactions of metabolism. Exercise stimulates the synthesis of mitochondria through a sophisticated process called mitochondrial biogenesis, making you a better fat-burning (and carbohydrate-burning) machine. The link between an increase in mitochondrial enzyme activity and an increase in mitochondria’s capacity to consume oxygen, first made in 1967 in the muscles of rats, has provided much insight into the ability of skeletal muscles to adapt. The increase in mitochondria steers your muscles’ fuel use toward a greater reliance on fat at the same exercise intensity, which is one of the hallmark adaptations to aerobic exercise. In essence, exercise resets your metabolism, stimulating fat mobilization and oxidation and creating the necessary conditions that direct the calories you eat into fulfilling specific metabolic demands.
Not only does exercise positively alter your metabolism and burn more calories than anything else you do during the day, it also means you spend less time sitting on your butt, doing calorie-storing things like watching television. People who watch TV are not exercising. Watching TV is a particularly bad habit if you want to be a successful weight loser. In fact, it is so detrimental to becoming a successful weight loser, and minimizing TV viewing is such a notable finding of the NWCR, that I almost added it as an additional habit of successful weight losers. People who increase the amount of television they watch, and decrease the amount of exercise they do, are at particularly high risk for weight gain. In a NWCR study published in Obesity Research in 2006, researchers discovered that 63.5 percent of NWCR members watch less than ten hours of TV per week, and 38.5 percent watch less than five hours per week. Only 12.5 percent watch more than twenty-one hours of TV per week.140 These findings are in stark contrast to the typical TV viewing behavior of American adults, who spend an average of twenty-eight hours per week watching TV.141 The NWCR has shown that the more TV people watch, the less they exercise. People who spend a high percentage of hours watching TV engage in less total, moderate-, and heavy-intensity weekly exercise and consume a greater percentage of their total daily calories from fat (people tend to eat more high-fat snacks while watching TV). Moreover, the amount of TV viewing and an increase in amount of TV viewing from one year to the next are both significant predictors of weight regain.
When you exercise, you are also more likely to form and stick to other habits that make becoming a successful weight loser more likely. For example, individuals who exercise more have greater control over their diets than individuals who exercise less, including lower fat consumption and greater cognitive restraint.142
And that leads us to Habit 6 of successful weight losers—exercising a lot every day. Indeed, the amount of exercise that the NWCR members do is one of their most notable habits. The members of the NWCR are more physically active and burn more calories than the general population, and even more than those enrolled in behavioral weight-loss programs.143 Most NWCR members—89.6 percent of women and 85.3 percent of men—exercise as part of their weight-loss and weight-maintenance strategy. Table 3 shows the number of calories the NWCR members burn per week during physical activity, from the several studies that have reported it, along with the amount of weight they lost at the time they entered the NWCR.
Table 3—Caloric Expenditure of Successful Weight Losers
|
Calories Per Week |
Pounds Lost |
|
|
2,832 (144) |
69 |
|
|
2,829 (145) |
66 |
|
|
2,985 (146) |
124 |
|
|
63 (women) |
||
|
2,542 (149) |
71 |
|
|
2,621 (150) |
71 |
|
|
2,521 (151) |
73 |
|
|
Average Women Men |
2,722 2,545 3,293 |
79 |
As you can see from the table, NWCR members burn a lot of calories exercising, far more than what is considered the minimum amount needed by the general public to prevent weight gain and to reduce obesity-associated risk factors for chronic disease. (Reputable organizations, like the American College of Sports Medicine, recommend 150 to 250 minutes of exercise—equaling about 1,200 to 2,000 calories—per week.152) The number of calories successful weight losers burn per week has remained the same across the studies over the years, from the earliest of the NWCR studies to the latest. Successful weight losers burn about 2,700 calories per week, with one study that separated the women and men in their analysis reporting that women burn about 2,500 and men burn about 3,300 calories per week.
Despite these averages, there is a lot of variability in how much exercise these successful weight losers engage in. A quarter of NWCR members burn fewer than a thousand calories per week, which suggests that there may be some individuals who can maintain their weight loss with less exercise. However, most of these successful weight losers exercise a lot: 72 percent burn more than two thousand calories per week, and 35 percent burn more than three thousand calories per week.153,154 To put this in perspective, walking or running one mile burns about 110 calories, give or take, depending on factors like body weight and aerobic economy. This means that these successful weight losers burn the equivalent of walking or running about twenty-four miles per week, with women burning the equivalent of twenty-three miles per week and men burning the equivalent of thirty miles per week. In one of the NWCR studies, which included 3,683 members, calories burned during high-intensity exercise accounted for 34 percent of the total calories burned per week for both men and women.155 When it comes to the amount and intensity of exercise, these successful weight losers don’t mess around!
In addition to the caloric expenditure data in Table 3, another study compared the number of minutes (rather than the number of calories) of sustained moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise between twenty-six NWCR members, thirty-four overweight individuals whose body mass index (BMI) was matched to that of the NWCR members, and thirty normal-weight individuals who were never obese. The NWCR members exercised at moderate-to-vigorous intensity for an average of 290 minutes per week (69.2 percent exercised at moderate-to-vigorous intensity for at least 150 minutes per week and 30.8 percent for at least 300 minutes per week), while overweight individuals exercised at moderate-to-vigorous intensity for an average of just 134 minutes per week, and normal-weight individuals for an average of 181 minutes per week.156 Thus, the successful weight losers spent significantly more time each week exercising at moderate-to-vigorous intensities than their overweight counterparts and were even more physically active than their normal-weight counterparts who had never been overweight.
The finding of successful weight losers being more physically active than people who were never overweight isn’t exclusive to the members of the NWCR. In a study on 237 individuals from outside of the NWCR, scientists compared the amount and intensity of exercise of successful female weight losers to individuals who had never been overweight.157 The weight losers once had a BMI of at least 25, were of normal weight (with a BMI between 18.5 and 25) at the time of the study, had lost and kept off at least 10 percent of their maximum body weight for at least five years, and were within ten pounds of their lost weight for at least two years prior to the study. Conversely, the normal-weight individuals were never overweight and always had a BMI between 18.5 and 25. Their weight also was stable, being within ten pounds of their weight for at least two years prior to the study. The successful weight losers were very successful, reducing their weight from an average of 199.8 pounds to 132.7 pounds, and maintaining at least 10 percent weight loss for more than fourteen years. What went into this incredible amount and longevity of weight loss? The scientists discovered that the successful weight losers spent more total time each day being physically active compared to the individuals who had never been overweight (58.6 minutes vs. 52.1 minutes), largely because they spent more time doing high-intensity exercise (24.4 minutes vs. 16.9 minutes, respectively). The majority of never-overweight individuals exercised thirty to sixty minutes per day, whereas a greater percentage of successful weight losers exercised more than sixty minutes per day.
Why do successful weight losers exercise so much? Partly because it takes a lot of exercise to prevent a return to previous weight, and partly because exercise has become a habit of this population. Ninety-two percent of NWCR members exercise at home, 40.3 percent exercise regularly with a friend, and 31.3 percent exercise in a group.158 Walking, running, cycling, weightlifting, aerobics classes, and stair climbing are the most common physical activities. Walking is the most popular, with 76.6 percent of NWCR members doing so as their preferred mode of exercise. Those walkers average more than 11,000 steps per day.159 Weight training has become more popular over the years, with 37.0 percent of men and 36.6 percent of women who enrolled in the registry from 2001 to 2004 doing it, compared to 25.3 of men and 22.9 percent of women who enrolled from 1993 to 1996.160 All these data have led the founders of the NWCR to conclude that the optimal amount of exercise to maintain weight loss is about one hour per day or, in terms of caloric expenditure, 2,500 to 3,000 calories per week.161
Although diet usually gets more attention in conversations on weight loss and maintenance, very few successful weight losers in the NWCR use diet alone to lose weight. Only 9 percent of these successful weight losers, who were a whopping ten BMI units lower than their pre-weight-loss BMI at the time they entered the NWCR (decreasing from 35 to 25 kg/m2), said they maintained their weight-loss (which averaged sixty-six pounds for five and a half years) without regular exercise.162 It seems that only some successful weight losers can maintain their weight without much exercise. Among these people are those who lose weight through bariatric surgery. Surgical weight losers are much less physically active than nonsurgical weight losers, burning only half as many calories per week (1,504 vs. 2,985 calories per week, respectively).163 (Surgical weight losers engage in different behaviors to maintain their lost weight than the rest of the NWCR. In addition to exercising much less and consuming less carbohydrate and more fat, they eat fast food more frequently and eat breakfast less frequently than nonsurgical weight losers.164) While changes to your nutritional habits—most crucial of which is how many calories you consume every day—have the bigger impact on getting your weight off, exercise has the bigger impact on keeping it off, and making you a successful weight loser.
In the days of “clean eating” and low-carb, vegan, paleo, gluten-free, keto, dairy-free, juice-cleanse diets, it’s become trendy to claim that diet is everything. Indeed, most fitness trainers claim that physical appearance and body weight are 80 percent nutrition and 20 percent exercise, and that “abs are made in the kitchen.” However, there is no scientific evidence to back up that claim. Exactly how much of a person’s physique is due to nutrition, how much is due to exercise, and how much is due to genetics is difficult to determine. (Research on identical twins raised apart in different environments has shown that genetics has a large influence on body weight.165,166) It’s presumptuous to think that the specific foods you eat are more important to your cosmetics, fitness, and health than are exercise and genetics. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get my sculpted legs from eating kale salads; I got them from running six days per week for thirty-six years. And so it is for other physically active people as well. Athletes, bodybuilders, and dancers all do a considerable amount of physical training to look and perform the way they do. The sculpted legs of runners and upper bodies of fitness magazine models didn’t get that way just by eating fruits and vegetables. If we take two people, and one eats perfectly clean, with a nutrient-dense diet and no processed foods, but doesn’t exercise much, and the other works out in the gym every day, but has a mediocre diet with the occasional chocolate chip cookie, who is going to look better and be fitter? Obviously, the latter.
A decrease in physical activity is a major reason why people gain weight. Think of your high school’s star quarterback who has a big belly at middle age. How many people at age thirty or forty or fifty weigh the same as they did in high school? The NWCR has shown that individuals who regain weight within one year show marked decreases in physical activity of more than eight hundred calories per week, with no change in overall calorie intake.167,168 That means that weight losers are regaining their weight not because they start eating more, but because they start exercising less. This is a major finding of the NWCR—a large part of regaining weight after losing it is due to the inability to maintain exercise habits for the long term.
One NWCR study found a significant relationship between the amount of exercise and the amount of weight loss maintained, with individuals in the highest quartile of exercise maintaining a nine-pound greater weight loss than those in the lowest quartile of exercise.169 A later study on 3,591 successful weight losers who enrolled in the NWCR from 1993 to 2004 (2,723 women and 868 men) found that higher levels of physical activity are associated with greater amounts of weight loss and a lower body weight. Individuals in the highest exercise group (burning more than 3,500 calories per week) weighed an average of 7.3 pounds less than those in the lowest physical activity group (burning less than 1,000 calories per week) and were maintaining a 9.2-pound greater weight loss at the time they entered the registry.
This emphasis on exercise among successful weight losers is not limited to the US. In a review of fifty-two research studies from the several weight control registries around the world (including US, Portugal, Germany, Finland, and Greece), increased physical activity was the most consistent factor that positively correlated to weight-loss maintenance.170 Other research independent of the NWCR and international weight control registries has also shown the powerful effects of exercise in keeping weight off, and that high levels of physical activity are particularly important for being a successful weight loser.171-178 One randomized clinical trial compared the effects of prescribing moderate or high levels of physical activity (1,000 calories per week vs. 2,500 calories per week) to 202 overweight individuals.179 Weight loss was measured after six, twelve, and eighteen months. Not only did the 2,500-calorie-per-week group lose more weight after eighteen months compared to the 1,000-calorie-per-week group, the total amount of calories burned during exercise was strongly correlated with weight change.
One way to create the exercise habit is to exercise at the same time every day. One of the latest NWCR studies, published in Obesity in 2019, found that 68 percent of registry members were consistent in the timing of their exercise, with 47.8 percent being early-morning exercisers.180 Exercising first thing in the morning may be especially conducive to fostering an exercise habit, since waking up may serve as a cue for initiating exercise. Although early morning is the most common time of day to exercise among successful weight losers, having greater consistency in habit-forming cues to exercise (e.g., exercising first thing upon getting out of bed or pairing leaving your workplace with going to the gym) and making exercise automatic are more important than the time of day. Whether NWCR members exercised early in the morning or in the evening was not related to the amount of exercise they did. Individuals who were consistent exercisers at the same time every day exercised more often, did longer workouts, and exercised at a higher intensity more often. They were also more likely to meet national exercise guidelines compared to individuals who were inconsistent in the timing of their exercise. As with the creation of most habits, you need to set the right environment to exercise.
When you exercise, you must be careful about not depositing the calories you just spent. Humans are excellent at balancing caloric expenses with caloric deposits. It’s why overweight people have a hard time losing weight when they start exercising. As scientists at Montclair State University in New Jersey and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, discovered after reviewing the exercise and weight-loss research, the small amount of weight loss observed from the majority of exercise intervention studies is primarily due to low doses of prescribed exercise, compounded by a concomitant increase in caloric intake.181 In other words, people don’t exercise enough, and they eat more to compensate for the calories they expend during exercise. People tend to eat more when they exercise more, especially aerobic exercise, like hiking, running, or cycling. Research as far back as 1956 published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has shown that people’s caloric intake increases the more active they are.182 But the converse is not true. Below a specific level of activity—what the scientists called the “sedentary zone”—a decrease in physical activity is not followed by a matched decrease in food intake but rather by an increase. People at the extreme ends of physical activity—those who exercise a lot and those who don’t exercise at all—are the ones who eat the most.
I am often asked by people trying to lose weight how often they should exercise. While the best answer is that you only have to exercise on the days you eat, not everyone gets my sense of humor. But that answer is pretty close to the truth. If you aren’t prepared to substantially increase your physical activity, your chances of being a successful weight loser are low. When you’re physically active, you burn the fuel you consume, so it doesn’t collect around your waist or on your thighs or, worse yet, around your abdominal organs as visceral fat. Trying to keep your weight off without increasing physical activity makes it practically impossible to relax your diet. When you exercise, your diet can be more flexible—you can eat a few chocolate chip cookies and it won’t ruin your weight-loss or weight-maintenance goals; you can still become a successful weight loser. If you don’t exercise, however, your diet becomes everything; no chocolate chip cookies allowed.
Successful weight loss requires more exercise to keep the weight off than what it takes to prevent excessive weight gain in the first place. People who don’t exercise (or reduce how much exercise they do) are not only more likely to gain weight, it is inevitable that they will. A consistent, high level of exercise is one of the most important predictors of whether or not someone will be able to keep the weight off.183 In one NWCR study on 3,591 of its members, while neither the amount of exercise, total daily calories consumed, nor percentage of calories from fat at the time they entered the registry predicted weight regain after three years, changes in these variables did predict weight regain.184 Over the three years, 44 percent of individuals decreased the amount of exercise calories they burned by at least 500 calories per week, and 36 percent increased the amount of calories they consumed by at least 150 calories per day. Individuals who decreased exercise and increased calories consumed regained more weight. The combination of both had even greater consequences—those who decreased exercise and increased calories consumed regained the most weight over three years. The converse was also true: those who increased exercise and decreased calories consumed regained the least weight over three years.
To delve deeper into the characteristics and exercise habits of the NWCR, a study on 2,228 of its members divided them into clusters based on their characteristics and behaviors.185 The researchers found that the NWCR members can be divided into four clusters. Cluster 1, which is made up of 50.5 percent, is the “Typical Members.” They fit well with most of the characteristics of successful weight losers from the NWCR. They lost an average of 62.4 pounds and kept off the NWCR requirement of at least thirty pounds for an average of 5.8 years. They consume an average of 1,373 calories per day and do the most amount of exercise (2,853 calories per week). Their most common strategies for maintaining or losing weight include keeping many healthy foods in the house (96.6 percent of members), weighing on a regular basis (85.5 percent), and keeping few high-fat foods in the house (79.8 percent). More than a quarter (27.7 percent) say they can eat what they want and maintain weight. Cluster 2, which is made up of 26.9 percent, is the “Strugglers.” They are more likely to have been obese as children, used more structured help to lose weight, and struggled the most to maintain their weight loss. Even so, they lost an average of 100.5 pounds, the most of all the clusters. They consume 1,457 calories per day and burn 2,492 calories per week during exercise. They were the least healthy of the four clusters before successful weight loss, with the highest prevalence of hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, sleep apnea, and major depression. Only 6.8 percent say they can eat what they want and maintain weight. Cluster 3, which is made up of 12.7 percent (and the highest percentage of men at 41.6 percent), are the “Stars.” They are the polar opposite of Cluster 2. They have immediate and long-term success. Nearly all (94.8 percent) succeeded on their first try at weight loss. They lost an average of 56 pounds and kept off the NWCR requirement of at least thirty pounds for an average of 11.1 years, almost five years longer than any other cluster. They are the most weight-stable group, being the least likely to have been overweight as children or as adolescents, and the least likely to have an overweight family. They consume 1,419 calories per day and burn 2,661 calories per week. More than a third (36.8 percent) say they can eat what they want and maintain weight. Cluster 4, which is made up of 9.9 percent, is the “No Exercisers.” They lost an average of 70.4 pounds but, although they are still successful weight losers, they don’t engage in as many of the lifestyle behaviors as members of the other clusters, most notably exercise. They consume 1,352 calories per day and burn only 728 calories per week, far below that of other clusters, and don’t use many other strategies to compensate, other than consuming fewer meals per day than members of the other clusters. When asked to rate the importance of following an exercise routine to maintain their weight on a scale of 1 (not important at all) to 8 (extremely important), the No Exercisers rate exercise at 3.2, while Clusters 1, 2, and 3 rate it much higher at 7.5, 7.4, and 7.3, respectively. Similar to the Stars of Cluster 3, 37.5 percent of No Exercisers say they can eat what they want and still maintain their weight.
While it may be easy or convenient to think that the reason why some people exercise and others don’t is because the ones who do have the time and resources, like access to a gym or personal trainer, or because they simply like to exercise, the NWCR has shown that what makes a successful weight loser exercise has little to do with these factors. Whether or not someone exercises comes down to his or her commitment and the creation of and persistence in the habit. Remember habit 1? Live with intention. When you are serious and persistent in your commitment to keep the weight off and you have created the environmental cues to make the exercise habit unconscious, that intention will direct your behavior.
Creating the Habit
Contrary to creating dietary habits, creating exercise habits requires greater action. It’s much easier to stop drinking soda or eat from a smaller plate than it is to run around the block or take a group fitness class at the gym. Perhaps the best way to create the habit of exercising (a lot) every day is to make the decision to be happier and live a more fulfilling life. That decision will direct your efforts. Strive toward a goal and to become a better version of yourself. Habit 1, Live with Intention, is important here, so you must develop that habit first. Once you have created that habit, try these strategies:
1) Lay your workout clothes right next to your bed so you are encouraged to exercise first thing in the morning. Your workout clothes become a visual cue to exercise.
2) Exercise at the same time every day. Like for the majority of NWCR members who do so, exercising at the same time every day is a potent way to create a habit.
3) Find a friend to go to the gym with you, and make a regular, standing gym appointment with that friend.
4) Hire a personal trainer who can coach you through workouts and provide accountability, motivation, and inspiration.
5) Start small. You don’t have to run a marathon the first week. Some exercise is better than no exercise, even just a ten-minute walk every other day. Remember, you are creating the habit. The more often you set time aside to do something physically active, even if it’s for just a few minutes, you are training your brain to create the habit.
6) Set a timer at your office desk to ring every fifteen minutes. Every time you hear the ring, stand up from your chair and do twenty squats. Like Pavlov’s dogs that salivated when hearing a bell because their brains were trained to think they were getting food, your brain will eventually associate “ring” with “squats,” and you’ll do it automatically. (Your coworkers may initially think you’re a bit strange when they see you squatting to a timer, but soon you’ll have them doing it, too!)
7) Cancel your cable TV service. Part of creating an exercise habit is becoming aware of and eliminating the habits that prevent you from exercising. Watching TV is one of the biggest exercise-preventing habits. There is a direct relationship between how much TV people watch and how little they exercise. If TV is no longer an option, that leaves you time to create the habit of exercise.
8) Always have a physical goal you’re working toward. With a goal, exercise becomes training for the goal, rather than exercise for the sake of exercise. To steal a line from New York Yankees baseball player Yogi Berra, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. A goal provides you with the knowledge of where you’re going.
9) Know your “why.” The successful weight losers in the NWCR have reasons for being physically active that are connected to their personal values and mission and go far beyond reaching a number on a scale. Find a physical activity that you feel good doing, something that gives you confidence, something through which you feel self-acceptance.
***
“The experience of walking through that landscape—towering red canyon walls rising six hundred, eight hundred, one thousand feet, painted with streaks of black varnish deposited over thousands of years, deep sapphire sky above, and electric yellow cottonwood leaves—shifted something in me,” Jamie Ash says. “The visual beauty of the place was astounding, but the experience of spending day after day moving, walking, breathing deeply was equally transformational.” Jamie’s previous experience with exercise was as something she felt she had to do to lose weight, a chore, something to get on the other side of as quickly as possible. But, hiking in Utah, Jamie discovered, was movement for the pleasure of it, which was altogether a different experience. “I fell in love with hiking, with being outside, and continued to hike after I got home,” she says. When winter came a couple of months later, she got snowshoes so she could continue to hike.
After a few months of hiking, Jamie noticed that her clothes fit differently. When I started hiking as a way to move through a beautiful landscape, I had not thought of weight loss, let alone significant, lasting weight loss,” she says. “Having been unsuccessful maintaining my previous weight loss, I thought it wasn’t really possible for me and would likely end in disappointment and failure. Since I like to be successful, I chose not to try.” Stepping on the scale for the first time in a year, she weighed less. “Not a lot less,” she says, “maybe five pounds, but it was enough that I started to consider intentionally trying to lose weight.”
Jamie changed the way she ate. She stopped going to her favorite place for enchiladas after she hiked. She stopped eating dessert. She learned portion control. She started counting calories. “I became aware of the difference between eating out of hunger and eating out of boredom, or proximity to the kitchen,” she says. “I got comfortable with the sensation of hunger, not just eating because I liked to eat, and stopping before I was overly full.” She also started counting hours per week hiking on the trail. The weight came off steadily, but, to her, it was a surprise. She weighed herself once per week. Every week, the number decreased by one, one and a half, sometimes two pounds.
As she lost weight, she read scientific articles for help and hints, and came across the NWCR. “I saw it was about maintaining weight, which was something I had never been able to do,” she says. “I set a goal of becoming part of that database. My thinking was that by joining and receiving the annual surveys, I would be accountable to something outside of myself.”
When Jamie’s weight dropped to the mid-140s, she found herself in uncharted territory as an adult. “When I broke into the 130s, I didn’t even know what to think,” she says. “When I hit the 120s a year after starting to lose weight, well, I still get teary-eyed thinking about that. I never thought it was possible for my body to be as small or as strong as I was becoming. I could hike farther with less effort. I felt lithe, powerful, self-possessed. It felt like a treat every day to have the body I had.”
In summer of 2019, Jamie’s spouse was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They lived in nearby Albuquerque through December during radiation treatment. “I joined a gym during our time there, but I was doing about a third of the amount of exercise I’m used to,” she says. To augment her spouse’s weight loss from the cancer and treatment, Jamie cooked delicious, calorie-laden meals for both of them, including an evening meal of ice cream. “I went on an ice cream diet for that time,” she says. “Much less weekly exercise and a high-fat, ice cream diet is not the way to maintain one’s weight loss.” After increasing to 132 pounds, the most she weighed in five years, she again noticed that her clothes were getting tight. She joined Weight Watchers since she felt she needed some structure to help her maintain the loss. She’s now 128 pounds, working on getting back to 125 pounds. She has kept off 44 pounds for five years. It has taken a concerted effort, attention, and willingness to be hungry. “For the most part, the maintenance hasn’t been that difficult, although I’m finding that shedding the six or so pounds I recently gained requires a strictness I’m not used to,” she admits.
Exercise has been Jamie’s biggest habit to maintain her weight. Lots of it. “My hiking has brought me access to experiences that seemed out of reach,” she says. “It has also become a central strategy to reducing the stress of my spouse’s pancreatic cancer.” After a couple of years of hiking, she went on her first backpacking trip. She loved it so much that she started to go backpacking on her own. After her first solo backpacking trip, she signed up for a two-week backpacking and pack rafting trip to the Arrigetch Peaks. “If I had not maintained my weight loss, that trip would have been unthinkable,” she says. Her odyssey even made it into The Taos News.
While training for a second trip to the Brooks Mountain Range in May 2019, Jamie fell and broke her ankle. “One of my first thoughts was how I could strategize to keep the weight off,” she says. While on crutches, she got creative and exercised on the rowing machine at the gym with her broken leg crossed over her healthy leg. She also was careful to eat smaller portions and no sugar or desserts. With these strategies, she was able to maintain her weight loss through the injury.
Hiking has become central to Jamie’s life and her identity, something that gives her much more than weight maintenance; it gives her solitude. “It’s a different kind of solitude than simply having time alone in my house or time alone when I’m working,” she says. “It’s an expansive solitude.”
When Jamie describes her hiking experience, she speaks with the eloquence of a philosopher. “Hiking alone gives me access to a kind of forest quiet: the gurgle of water running over rocks and fallen branches, the hammering of woodpeckers making themselves a roost in a tree, the wind blowing through pine boughs, sometimes soft and gentle, sometimes harsh and ferocious. It’s full of physical challenge that I have come to love. As I hike in the Columbine-Hondo Wilderness, which climbs to over 12,000 feet of altitude, there’s lots of walking uphill, which is never easy. It involves breathing hard, working my muscles, and the determination to get up high. Then there’s a big payoff as I look down from a ridge or a summit to the mesas below or across the undulating ridges of mountains. It keeps me grounded, emotionally even, and walking for hours gives me lots of endorphins.”
I finished my conversation with Jamie, now fifty-eight years old, by asking her what she wants others to know about maintaining weight loss and what advice she has to give. “Accept the fact that you are probably never going to be able to ignore calories and exercise,” she says. “With sixty just a year and a half away, I’d like to think that all the exercise I do should allow me to eat whatever I want, but that is far from the reality.
“Make the experience of having a body that is easier to move and to live in be more important than the pleasure of eating. And find a physical activity you absolutely love and embrace it whole-heartedly. Let it become part of who you are, a self-expression.”
Habit 6
Exercise (A Lot) Every Day.