Outdoors/Adventure

Have your cake and eat it, too, but burn those calories in the Alaska outdoors

With Halloween next week and more holidays around the corner, many Alaskans start thinking about caloric intake. In a perverse twist in human evolution, during the coldest part of the year, we come to fear we have too much fat on our bones. Then the magazines crop up to reinforce our insecurities.

Headlines will shout at us at the grocery store: "Keep those pounds off during the holidays!" and suggest how to adopt a moderate approach toward eating in the coming months.

While restraint could work, I find it problematic.

Self discipline makes me want to eat more

The thing about chocolate cake is, it's really not that good. I mean, in one way it's amazingly good. But it's also fleeting. Either you painstakingly create, buy, or are lucky enough to happen upon chocolate cake. Once you have it, you shovel the cake in your mouth in the most unattractive way, leaving smears all over your face (if you're me, anyway). And then? It's gone. It's over.

But I want chocolate cake. Defying all reason, I want it every time I see it. It's really hard for me to refuse, and if I do refuse, I just want it later — but ten times more.

As a woman, and one with a slow thyroid who was once a chubby, asthmatic teenager, I have had battles with self-discipline when it comes to cake and other foods. When I was younger, I faced down nasty issues with over- or under-eating. Over time, one excellent mechanism I discovered to overcome these issues was to flee them.

To actually flee required me to go outside in all manner of conditions. Yes. I could exercise indoors, but I found that I couldn't flee anything at the gym, where I was trapped on a machine. I'd like to think my love of the outdoors evolved from a natural need to frolic through the great beyond, but much of that drive was probably tied to self-loathing and flagellation. Healthy, I know.

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Yet, after the initial unhealthy push toward exercising, I discovered that not only does exercising outdoors burn more calories and build more muscle than indoors (think of all the muscles you use to balance on uneven terrain or in strong winds)it's got a much prettier view. Hands down, I preferred getting outside.

The bonus was the pride of achievement. I'd get outside even in inclement weather, or I'd see something that the rest of those desk-bound slackers were too lazy to get to. This pride overrode the feeling of self-loathing, at first on a case-by-case basis but eventually in a bigger way.

Chocolate cake was beside the point, and of course I ate it when I was back from my hike, ski, or run. Then I forgot about it and went on with my plans and my life.

Being outside requires fuel

A couple of days ago I walked into the kitchen at the office and loudly whined, like the teenager I am deep inside, "Why am I so hungry?" My coworker smiled and brightly offered, "It's because you exercise like an insane person!" I reflected on this as I dug into the jar of peanut butter with a spoon and went back to sit down at my desk.

I recalled running around Lake Hood on Christmas Day. Three times.

After running a race on Thanksgiving morning several years ago, I finished huffing and puffing and breathlessly asked my husband, "How'd you do?" He said, "Good! I won."

While it may sound terrible to exercise in frigid weather on what is supposed to be the holy grail of gluttonous holidays (not counting Super Bowl Sunday), it actually makes the feasting better.

Eggnog tastes better. Ham. Stuffing, potatoes, turkey, pecan pie, you name it. If you exercised beforehand, write off those delicious calories as fuel.

Clothes are looser

The only problem with this theory, which you may have guessed, is that no amount of exercise can actually justify the ridiculous quantities of food many of us are privileged to take in during the holidays. It takes about 10 minutes to burn 100 calories on a run. Depending on how perilously I have stacked food on my fork, and whether there is a Turducken at play, it could take me as little as a forkful to get those calories back.

I still get the fit of self-loathing the day after. I still feel impressed, amazed, and disgusted at myself for gleefully playing right into the gluttony. You know what erases all that?

It's a combination of going outside again, and looser clothing when all else fails. It's winter in Alaska, and I'm OK with having more than one reason to wear my down coat until May.

This is the headline I'd like to see in women's magazines: Weight gain? Don't worry. Live your life. Go outside. Be proud of what you do. Eat cake.

Alli Harvey lives, works and plays in Anchorage.

Alli Harvey

Alli Harvey lives in Palmer and plays in Southcentral Alaska.

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