Thru-Hiking & Weight Loss: Focus on Enjoyment, Not Dieting

Thru-hiker forums (and, let’s be honest, the internet at large) love a before-and-after photo. Scan through a few threads and you’ll notice that the most popular photos tend to fall into two categories: massive beard growth and massive weight loss.

The latter isn’t surprising. We live in a society obsessed with thinness, and most folks are drawn to anything that seems like a quick fix—even if “quick” means a five-month hike across an entire nation. When I interviewed Registered Dietician Stefan Schuster about packing the right amount of food for a hike last month, he told me that he sees a lot of people set out on backpacking trips with a goal of losing weight. Then he said something that surprised me: It’s a bad idea.

I tend to physically recoil at any kind of weight-loss talk, especially when it has to do with hiking, which is one of the things that helped me learn how to appreciate my body after years of feeling otherwise. Still, Schuster’s comment made me do a double-take. After all, there’s a ton of research demonstrating that walking consistently is an effective and relatively safe way to shed extra poundage. So, why is it such a bad idea to use backpacking to reach a weight-loss goal?

It’s not always effective.

Increasing or adding a daily exercise habit to your routine can lead to weight loss for many people. However, going on a backpacking trip isn’t a matter of making a small but sustainable tweak: it’s a matter of doing something totally different for a defined period of time, and then immediately returning to the life you led beforehand.

Thru-hiking is the most extreme version of that shift, so let’s start there. According to The Trek’s 2024 Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker Survey, which interviewed nearly 400 thru-hikers, about 75 percent lost a modest amount of weight on the trail. A significant percentage maintained their weight. Some even gained weight. More women than men reported weight maintenance, even though the majority of the survey respondents were male. That’s likely because women have a higher body-fat percentage than men and more hormonal mechanisms for protecting that extra weight. Anecdotally, the female thru-hikers I’ve interviewed over the years have mostly reported gaining weight on the trail, typically in leg muscle.

Your post-thru-hike body composition doesn’t tend to stick around, either. It’s tough to readjust to a civilian exercise routine, and hiker hunger can last for weeks after you get off the trail. Many backpackers also struggle with the post-hike blues, which can trigger emotional eating. All this is extremely normal. Plus, your body is hungry after a big backpacking trip. You’ve just put it through the wringer. It needs time (and nutrients) to recover, and it’s often healthy to fill back out once a trip is done. For all those reasons, many thru-hikers report gaining all the weight back after their hike.

You’ll set yourself up for injury

Many people like the idea of losing weight—even temporarily. But according to Schuster, you really don’t want to.

“Weight loss and going on extreme hikes are very contradictory,” he says. After all, if you want to feel good, perform well, and accomplish an objective you’re proud of, you need to be well-fueled. If you’re not, you run the risk of watching your body break down in real time.

“If your body is not getting the right amount of energy it needs, then it’s going to start looking for that energy from other parts of your body,” Schuster says.

If you’re rapidly losing weight on the trail, you’re likely losing fat—but you’re probably losing muscle tissue, too. Fat does tend to go first, but your body won’t wait til every last speck of fat is gone before it starts chewing on your muscles—and later your organs and bones. (As registered dietitian Katie Berylski told Backpacker recently, fat and muscle breakdown can start happening simultaneously.) That’s a recipe for illness, tendonitis, stress fractures, and other overuse injuries, says Schuster.

It’ll sap the fun from your hike

Listen, I get it. A lot of us would like to be a little bit smaller. If you want to change your body, that’s absolutely your business. But it’s important to remember that rapid weight loss rarely works in the long run, and it can leave you with an illness or injury that could ruin your hike or leave you sidelined afterward.

Backpacking is amazing—but not because of how it makes you look. Hiking is one of the most pure and intimate ways to explore this vast, beautiful world we call home. It’s a precious privilege and an opportunity for wild adventure. It’s a container for profound realizations, deep belly-laughs, and life-changing connection with a world beyond the ordinary. If you want to revel in that experience—and I mean really revel in it—you need to be present, fueled, and ready for anything. If that sounds like more fun than counting your Cheez-Its, then it’s probably in your best interest to keep your weight loss goals and hiking goals separate.

How to ditch the hiking food stress

If you have a hard time dropping that secret, niggling hope of weight loss every time you leave the trailhead, you’re not alone. That shit runs deep, and so many of us struggle with those feelings. (I know I do, even after years of working diligently to combat them. Some days are better than others—that’s just part of being human.)

This is what I try to remember: life is about more than a number on the scale. Backpacking is incontrovertible proof of that. Plus, it’s supposed to be fun. So, bring the extra snacks. Eat the Nutella out of the jar. Have a Snickers before bed. You don’t need to eat the exact perfect right amount, and you don’t need to come home lighter than you left. Your body does amazing things for you, and eating more than you “need” just means you’re giving it a little extra buffer to protect it against injury and help it recover for another day of adventure. So don’t overthink it. And don’t compare your body to a body it’s not. The one you’ve got is just right.