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 convinced me I needed some exercise.
One of the cool things about “The Sopranos” is how the show humanizes its characters
by such things as showing Mafia kingpins in their underwear. Just about every
episode features some shot of Tony with his gut hanging over his boxer shorts,
out his bathrobe, etc. I started noticing that my gut looked a lot like his
gut, and given that I saw a poor future in bettering myself by murdering my
rivals, I needed to resort to more conventional means of self-improvement.

A few months after this epiphany, my wife and I moved to a cottage on a hill
overlooking Silicon Valley. I started taking walks for exercise on the up-and-down
country roads nearby and noticed right away that walking uphill worked up one
hell of a sweat.

Pretty soon I was going out on morning walks and working up a hellacious sweat
every time. Then I got me a fanny pack with twin water bottles, and I noticed
I had to tighten it a little bit more every few days. This got me down from
my top weight of around 207 to about 190, which is where all my previous weight-loss
sagas stalled.

Around this time I made up my mind to really get serious about losing some
weight, which meant the dreaded Going on a Diet. Except I didn’t really go on
a diet, I just cut the ridiculously high calories out of the diet I already
had.

I called it the No Cokes, No Cookies diet. It worked like this: A 12-ounce
Coke has about 150 calories. One of my wife’s phantasmagorically good oatmeal
chocolate chip monster cookies might have as much as 350 calories. Every day
I would eat one of these with my lunch and wash it down with a Coke. That’s
500 calories right there. I decided to switch to water and baby carrots, which
worked worked out to about 100 calories if I really got the munchies.

Then I switched from a relatively easy walk over five up-and-down miles to
a six-mile sole-killer that was three miles downhill, then three miles up with
about 800 feet of elevation gain. The combination of cutting calories and busting
butt on hills started melting pounds like nobody’s business.

All told, I lost 37 pounds in less than six months.

I wasn’t exactly sure how I did it, till I started researching some basic numbers
about weight loss. The essential number is 3500 — that’s how many calories
must be burned to get rid of a single pound of body fat.

How much effort would it require to burn off that many calories? For me, a
half-hour hike burns about 250 calories (the more you weigh, the more energy
is needed to propel your body forward, so people who weigh 140 lbs. burn far
fewer calories per hour than those who weigh 200). That means 14 half-hour hikes
to lose one pound. Losing 30 pounds means 420 half-hour hikes. Daunting, I know.

But check this out: If I cut the Cokes and cookies out of my diet (400 calories
after subtracting 100 for my baby carrots) and hike just a half-hour every day
I’m creating a deficit of 650 calories a day, which means I lose the first pound
in five days. I”m on track to lose 4-6 pounds a month and upwards of 50 pounds
in a year — all by adding one half-hour of physical activity and cutting just
two food items out of my diet.

Taking the weight off, as anybody can tell you, is far easier than keeping
it off. I’ve gained back about 5 of the pounds I lost, which puts me at 175,
which is a bit heavier than I should be but leaves me with a small storehouse
of body fat that’ll come in handy if I ever get stranded in the woods with no
food for a week. My weight stays pretty stable so long as I kick myself in the
butt every few days and take some tough hikes on the hill down the road. As
soon as I start letting up, I can feel my jeans get tighter around the waist.

I never made major traction on weight loss till I changed my diet. Exercise
is physically challenging, but it’s easier to get into because even if it doesn’t
feels good doing it, if feels great having done it. Giving up tasty
food, however, is pure sacrifice with no feel-goodness at all, except maybe
when you weigh yourself.

Another thing I discovered in my weight-loss research is that a healthy diet
and regular exercise can add like 10 years to your life. Physically active people
don’t get nearly as sick in their waning years, and are far less likely to suffer
from chronic, debilitating conditions that leave them bedridden for months on
end. Fitness is like a savings account in which a few hours a week of sacrifice
pay you back in years in your retirement. A far better deal than your 401(k).
You can’t spend money when you’re dead.