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Krista Diamond | Longreads | May 30, 2024 | 9 minutes (2,660 words)
Before I climb the mountain, I stop at 7-Eleven and buy a sandwich. The 7-Eleven is in Tromsø, Norway—technically the northernmost 7-Eleven on earth, but what’s really special about it is the food: tikka masala, soft-serve frozen yogurt, fresh smoothies, croissants, and most relevant to my hiking plans, paninis. The sandwiches are too big, I think, looking at them behind the glass deli counter. A big meal is a source of shame to me. A big meal is not something I like to consume in front of other people; I only eat it in secret, by myself, after I’ve had a tiny meal in public. But the panini is the size that it is and I need lunch for this hike, so I order and stuff it into my backpack.
I tell myself I’ll only eat like, half of it, tops.
We’ve had the pleasure of publishing Krista Diamond in the past. Be sure to read ‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed,’ her reported personal essay on risk in the wilderness.
When I was 19, I signed up for a summer outdoor adventure program. For two weeks, I sailed the coast of Maine, living on a 30-foot sailboat with 10 people. We slept on the oars, dove into the cold Atlantic each morning, saw phosphorescence dance beneath the current each night. When the wind wasn’t in our favor—which was often—we couldn’t sail so we rowed. We rowed in the fog, in the rain, in the wet cold past uninhabited islands where sheep improbably grazed. We rowed and we sang. We rowed and we cursed. And on breaks from rowing, we ate. We ate graham crackers with peanut butter and then graham crackers with regular butter and then best of all, graham crackers with peanut butter and regular butter. All of this fat was so good. So good at keeping us warm and full and happy. Those peanut-butter-regular-butter graham crackers made us kinder to each other. They allowed us to see the ocean as beautiful. They gave us the strength to guide the sailboat home.
Those peanut-butter-regular-butter graham crackers made us kinder to each other. They allowed us to see the ocean as beautiful.
When I was 25, I climbed Mount Whitney, which, at 14,505 feet, is the highest mountain in the contiguous United States. To train for it, my boyfriend and I did a series of hikes above 10,000 feet. I got altitude sickness on every single one of them: nausea, headaches, fatigue so heavy that each step was exhausting. Altitude sickness is frustrating; it makes you feel less capable than you are. The only real cure for it is to get off the mountain, but in the meantime you can treat it the way you’d treat the worst hangover of your life: fluids, electrolytes, bland carbohydrates. For me, this means blue Gatorade and salted pretzels, two food items I’d personally avoid at a gas station in the real world. But in the mountains, this combination is medicine. This combination is what got me to the top of Mount Whitney, even though I felt like throwing up, even though I kept looking down from the 99 switchbacks above Consultation Lake and thinking of what it would be like to turn around, to be in a motel bed in Lone Pine. I ate pretzels on the trail. I ate pretzels on the summit. I ate pretzels and was grateful.
In a 2015 interview with Backpacker, longtime search and rescue ranger Bil Vandergraff warned against packing your backpack with items you think you should eat on a hike. Instead, he suggested going for what you actually crave: junk food, like cold pizza. His reasoning was both psychological and physical. On a psychological level, the slice of pizza just might be the thing that pushes you to keep going instead of turning back. This is crucial at the Grand Canyon, where Vandergraff worked for 25 years. Visitors who hike from the rim to the river lose almost 5,000 feet of elevation along the way. Sometimes, when they’re standing at the bottom it seems impossible to get back up. Some of them end up requiring rescue not because their bodies have given up but because their minds have. Vandergraff calls this “having the psychology to get yourself out of the canyon.” On a physical level, a salty, high-calorie meal can prevent hyponatremia, a life-threatening condition that occurs when you’ve been drinking water all day but not replacing the electrolytes you’re flushing out. In the interview, Vandergraff said the park service at the Grand Canyon—a place that regularly sees temperatures above 100 degrees at its lowest elevations—actually deals with more rescue cases involving hyponatremia than dehydration.
Some of them end up requiring rescue not because their bodies have given up but because their minds have.
Reading Vandergraff’s interview, I thought of all the times I’d arrived at the top of the mountain, sweaty, out of breath, ready for a good long break on a warm rock, only to reach into my backpack and find plain almonds, carrots, an apple. So I tried it his way. I wrapped a slice of pepperoni pizza in foil and drove to Death Valley for a hike in the park’s Funeral Range. It was a revelation, as much as grocery store frozen pizza can be. After that I switched entirely to taking food I liked with me on hikes—bacon breakfast burritos from gas stations, chocolate-covered raisins, almonds with spicy dill seasoning instead of the plain ones. And cold pizza. Cold pizza, always.
When you’re hiking, you eat what you’ve brought with you, what you can get. Eating, even eating junk food—sometimes especially eating junk food—is not just a good idea but potentially the difference between life and death, or at the very least the difference between an enjoyable experience and a grueling one. No one has ever opened up a packet of Oreos on a mountaintop and said, “I’m being so bad.” But bad is a word I’ve heard a lot in the real world. Bad is the word my mother used when she brought out ice cream after dinner. Bad is what my friends and I were when we ate zebra cakes in our high school cafeteria. Bad is what the women’s magazines told me I was being when I ordered the french fries instead of the salad. Bad is how I felt each time I ate a slice of birthday cake at a party where I’d vowed to stick to the crudités. Sugar is bad. Carbohydrates are bad. Fat is bad. All the things you want are bad and you are bad for wanting them. For me, this is complicated further by the fact that I live in Las Vegas, a city that paradoxically values both indulgence and conventional beauty in equal measures. In Las Vegas, there are buffets with hundreds of items, there are mini ferris wheels containing fried appetizers, there are Bloody Marys garnished with crab legs, there is a downtown restaurant famous for its nearly 20,000-calorie burger. In Las Vegas, there are also ultracompetitive auditions for bikini-clad cocktail server jobs, there are showgirls with flat stomachs, there is the privilege of skipping the line if you are beautiful. In Las Vegas, it is possible to exist around so much pleasure and feel bad when you give into it.
When you’re hiking, you walk and you run and you reach and you climb because this is how you get up the mountain or through the canyon or to the lake. Every movement is a necessity. On the trail, I don’t think about how many steps the health app on my phone is counting, if I’m doing enough to please it. I don’t think about the calories I’m burning or the fat I’m shrinking or the muscles I’m growing. There is no part of me that hopes that if I do this enough my waistline will be smaller. In the real world, exercise is a punishment. I go to a gym and run on a treadmill, which, unlike hiking, is just going nowhere. Sometimes it feels like the point is to go nowhere, to watch the numbers on the machine, to look up at the beautiful people on the muted televisions anchored to the ceiling and know that I will never reach them.
All the things you want are bad and you are bad for wanting them.
When you’re hiking, you wear what is comfortable, what keeps you warm or cool or dry. Sometimes when I try on hiking pants at a store I am concerned about how my butt looks or I feel guilty when the bigger size fits better than the smaller size. But out in nature, I do not care. Fifteen miles into a 30-mile hike in Glacier National Park, when the blue sky turned black and lightning struck the mountains and made the very soil feel electric, it sure as shit didn’t matter what I looked like. On the summit of Mount Whitney, I wasn’t thinking about how my shorts fit; I was only thinking about the view and how hard it had been to get there to see it, how proud of myself I was that I’d made it. Women’s hiking apparel is marketed with words like “durable, versatile, lightweight.” Materials are described in terms of what they can do for you: protect you from the sun, reduce chafing, allow mobility. Women’s everyday apparel is advertised with the language of aspirational thinness. I scrolled through 30 pairs of pants on one popular retailer’s website and 18 of them used some variation of the word “slimming.”
Sometimes I think the meal I eat after a long hike is the happiest I ever feel. Chicken nuggets from the drive-through on the way home from the mountains. Chinese takeout on the couch after I throw my backpack on the floor. But then I realize the only reason I am happy is because I’ve earned it, because I burned thousands of calories earlier in the day, allowing me a free pass to not feel bad. The moment of eating the meal marks a transition from the hiking world to the real world. The meal is motivated by hunger and the need to eat, as is the case with all meals in the wilderness, but it is tainted by the exchange of calories for work performed, the kind of diet commerce bound to a city where there are mirrored walls for you to catch your reflection in, gyms telling you it’s not too late to get a head start on your New Year’s resolution, and crowds full of people to compare yourself to.
When I am hiking, I care for myself. I wear comfortable clothes. I eat food that tastes good. I rest. I move. I thank my legs, my arms, my breath, my heart.
What would it mean to treat my body like that in the real world? To give myself everything I need to keep going? No punishing, no guilt, no withholding. Just nourishment.
This, I learned accidentally while scrolling TikTok, is an idea other people have too. In between videos titled debloat breakfast smoothie and everything I ate to lose 54 lbs, I started hearing the phrase intuitive eating. It seemed like just another fad, just another person selling a diet plan, but I got curious, so I looked it up and found that the concept predated social media. Intuitive eating comes from the 1995 book of the same name by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. There are 10 principles practitioners of intuitive eating follow—things like honoring your hunger and respecting your body. There’s a lot of stuff about learning to separate physical hunger cues from emotional hunger cues and talk of gentle nutrition and challenging the food police, but basically, what it comes down to is just eating when you’re hungry. That’s it. If this sounds obvious to you, know that I envy you deeply, that I have spent my entire life wishing I could be you and failing. Failing as a teenager in church when I skipped communion because I was worried about the carbohydrates in the wafer. Failing as an adult at a restaurant, watching my friends order what they wanted instead of what they’d decided they had earned. Failing at breakfast, at lunchtime, at dinner, in bed after eating too much, in the morning when I woke up hungry.
Fifteen miles into a 30-mile hike in Glacier National Park, when the blue sky turned black and lightning struck the mountains and made the very soil feel electric, it sure as shit didn’t matter what I looked like.
But I have never failed on a hike.
Unfortunately, though, I can’t live in that world.
After learning about intuitive eating, I typed “intuitive eating dietitian near me” into Google and found a website with a photo of Red Rock Canyon, home to the same trails I hike in Las Vegas. It seemed like a sign or at least a passable coincidence. We’re a good fit if you want to feel better, the website said. We’re a good fit if you’re not sure where to start. I made an appointment.
“Let’s begin with something easy,” the dietitian asked me. “What does an average day of eating look like for you?”
I thought of a day in the city, being good. Eating plain nonfat Greek yogurt for breakfast, a salad for lunch, salmon and steamed vegetables for dinner. I thought of a day in the city, being bad. French toast, mimosas, a steak and cheese sub gooey with white American cheese, the hot oil of a mozzarella stick. And then I thought of packing for a hike, taking my boots off and standing in a lake, eating lunch on the shore.
“I’m not sure what an average day is,” I said, “But I know what I want it to be.”
In Tromsø, the mountain has other plans. It’s a 10-mile hike with 2,000 feet of elevation gain. Two-thousand feet of elevation gain doesn’t sound that bad to me, but then a few miles in I encounter a sign that says god tur (good journey) indicating the final push to the summit and I realize that that 2,000 feet of elevation gain is going to be condensed into a single mile. And it is hard. The route up is near vertical. I claw my way up loose talus at an achingly slow pace into a white cloud that rings the summit and then I realize when I get there that that’s not the summit; the real summit is still higher. And then I get to that point and see more cliffs rising up, and another summit after that, like, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Black rock in the white sky. The blue of the ocean and the green of Arctic islands so far below. Never has a mountain had so many false summits. At this point, my body is doing the things my body does on a steep hike. My calf muscles burn each time they contract, release. My quad muscles tighten. My toes ache like they’re bruised, broken. My heart is loud and my blood is hot. The air I pull into my lungs never seems to fill me up. A tenth of a mile from the summit, there is another signal emerging, one that becomes louder and clearer the harder I push myself. It is my stomach, gnawing and turning like an angry animal. It is hunger, deeper than I’ve ever felt hunger before, because I had plain yogurt and black coffee for breakfast, because I have not stopped—rarely do stop—for snacks on the trail, preferring to maintain momentum.
And now my body is telling me what it wants so clearly it might as well be a pet, a child. Hey, it is saying, I need food. This is how it works. I need food to keep going.
The sandwich, once embarrassingly huge, becomes a source of motivation. When I finally reach the top, I unwrap it. I eat the entire thing, a protein bar, and some chips. I drink a bottle of Powerade. The clouds evaporate. The sun lights up the fjords, the snow. Seabirds coast on the wind. Below me, there is a village, a white cathedral. The sandwich, it seems, has gone from too big to just right through some kind of mountain alchemy. Of course, that’s not what happened. Nothing has changed about the meal itself, only the way I see it. Standing on the ridgeline above the ocean, it is what it has always been. Exactly enough food.
Krista Diamond‘s essays and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Hazlitt, HuffPost, Catapult, Joyland, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Bread Loaf and Tin House. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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