In this passage from Tony Kevin’s book “Walking the Camino”, Tony offers a home truth that we all know, but find it difficult  to practise. It is our built in survival mechanism to prepare for starvation. We need to temper that notion with reality. We need to reprogram our body to accept that it is ok to be hungry.

Do it slowly over a long period of time. Reduce your meal portion, don’t snack between meals and before every meal drink water. You might even try eating more slowly and paying close attention to the flavours.

Until that day, I had been eating and drinking as if I were at home, not admitting that as a distance walker, I might need to cut back on food intake, to take in no more food and drink than what I needed as daily walking fuel. We tend to eat and drink too much at home out of social habit or sheer boredom, as a distraction or relief from stress, or because we hope it might make us sleep better. Many of us become overweight as a result. It is a fallacy that we need more food when working hard physically. Most of us work better and have more energy when we eat less. People who can cope comfortably with long distance walks tend to be lean and wiry. I had thought that leanness had come as a consequence of walking, but it might be the other way around. To walk long distances enjoyably requires the self-discipline of reducing your food and alcohol intake to no more than you need. If you make your body work on digesting excess amounts of rich food and drink, this takes energy away from the energy you need to walk. Why make your body do all that extra work of digestion, when you can walk comfortably on much less food? Ruefully, I recalled that, despite 500 kilometers of strenuous walking, I had not lost a single kilogram of weight between Granada and Baios de Montemayor.

Walking the Camino. Tony Kevin