Snowshoeing

I'm home from my trip to Canada. Mountain Trek (www.hiking.com) is a "boot camp"-style weight-loss spa. Hiking in the mountains in summer, snowshoeing for 3 weeks in winter, and 1,200 calories per day of very good food. (Or 900 calories if you want to make it more extreme.) Also a gym for additional calorie burning, and a sauna and hot tub for after.

I only lost 9 pounds in 3 weeks, but at home I'd probably have gained a pound during that time.

It was great fun. The limited amount of food was hard, but the snowshoeing was mostly great. There were a few days when my toes got very cold, as I was wearing summer boots. (I don't have winter boots.) And there were days when the snow conditions made the going difficult. And my hands were very cold whenever I had to take my mittens off. But I got to break trail a lot because few others wanted to. That is very hard work, but I enjoyed it.

It's going to be different for me here on PC, now that I've resolved not to feed the trolls.

 

P.S. I didn't take my camera along. The attached photos were taken by another person and posted on kodak-dot-com.

 

The diet was a bit odd, due to some unconventional beliefs of the nutritionist. He believes (and I disagree) that it's important to eat most of your carbs early in the day and eat more protein and fat and less carbs than I think is ideal. So in my view there's too much fat and not enough carbohydrates.

All meals are high in protein. All food is organic or natural. Mostly whole foods. Breakfast has most of the carbs for the day. They used to give no carbs at supper, but now they include some. People who eat eggs are offered an egg at breakfast several times a week (formerly every day). I normally eat a lot of vegetables, so to my taste there's not enough veggies.

But the diet is basically balanced, natural, and delicious, as they have excellent cooks. Three meals a day plus a mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack, typically nuts or cheese or occasionally an apple. And a protein shake first thing in the morning, consisting of fruit and tofu.

Total calories for the day is 1,200 or 900 if you request the more severe version, though in winter they won't give men the 900.

They serve beef or venison occasionally for those who eat meat, and chicken more often. They serve fish often for those who eat it. Vegetarians get a lot of tofu. Everyone gets a lot of beans unless you request not to. They accommodate all special dietary restrictions, so anything you don't like can be substituted with something else. One woman once refused to eat anything that was small and round (peas, corn, etc.) and they accommodated that.

I've heard the theories that distinguish between different kinds of calories, but I think that's all balderdash. A calorie is a unit of energy. If you eat more than you burn the excess will be stored as fat. If you burn more than you eat the deficit will be made up by burning fat. At Mountain Trek you burn a lot of calories because the exercise is intense, and they provide the opportunity to burn even more by leaving the gym open 24 hours a day. But I mostly go there for the hiking, because British Columbia is the most beautiful country I've ever seen.

I have a Google Earth KMZ file to the place, but I don't know how to attach it as a file, since the new board seems to only accept doc, pdf, or image files. However if you put "Ainsworth, BC" into Google Earth you'll get there. The resolution is not good enough to see the lodge.

 

Some more pics, just received from another of the participants:

The first week's group.

Ron tries to slide down a hill, falls, and can't get up because the snow is too deep and soft.

Looking back at the trail we broke.

Eating lunch in the snow.

 

Ainsworth, BC, is not cold enough to require a lot of fat in the diet. Farley Mowat spent time with the native peoples of the far north. Very different conditions. At Ainsworth it was mostly just a little below zero Celsius outside, and very nice and warm inside, with a roaring fire for ambiance. Much warmer, for the 20 hours a day we were not snowshoeing, than an igloo.

If I go back to Mountain Trek for snowshoeing in winter again, you can bet I'll have winter boots. However, if I need to lose weight next winter I'm more likely to go to their Costa Rica location. And starting this fall they'll have a program in North Carolina, where I've never been. Neither place will be cold enough for winter boots.

 

Very different kind of sport. I've never heard of anyone breaking their legs while snowshoeing, whereas it seems awfully common with skiing. Also, skiing is pretty much limited to trails and open areas, due to the length of skis, whereas snowshoes can take you pretty much anywhere there's snow. We spent some time bushwacking through forest where there were no trails and skis would have been impossible. You can get a good workout with either sport (especially if you climb up on your skis before sliding down) but Mountain Trek uses snowshoeing for exercise because you can learn to walk on snowshoes in 5 minutes, and become proficient in 15 minutes. Skiing requires many hours of lessons to learn, and years to become proficient.

I don't doubt that skiing is fun, if you like speed and thrills. But it's very dangerous if you are not well trained, and proper training takes a long time. A person who's never been on snowshoes in his/her life can go out and enjoy the sport the first day.

 

San Francisco is cold. But I found Hawaii to be vastly over-rated. (Admittedly, I was only on the Big Island, except to change planes.)