I walked twenty miles this week, which makes forty miles in two weeks.  I’ve turned to this regimen because I want to slim down and I find it very difficult to give up eating.  So the question I’m asking is, “Can one lose the equivalent of one dress size after walking 80 miles over the course of a month?” Or will it require 160 miles over two months?  Two hundred forty miles over three months?  This is the research question my husband and I have chosen to investigate.  (To be clear, he’s not aiming for a smaller dress size.)  As an aside, we have both noticed that our walking shoes seem to have shrunk.  Wouldn’t it be something if the only change we noticed was larger feet?

I attended a nutrition class this week and learned that while we always hear that the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables is five to seven, this is because nutritionists are reluctant to tell the truth for fear they will scare off people completely.  The real answer is seven to nine servings per day.  With one cup of greens and one-half cup of fruits or vegetables representing a serving, that’s a heck of a lot of healthy food in a day.  I’m not sure my body can take it. After the class I went grocery shopping and bought more vegetables than I can remember buying in a long time.  Tonight we had spinach salad and spaghetti with asparagus on top and a red sauce loaded with red chard. It’s a good start.  I can only hope to be able to fit in the rainbow chard, the rest of the spinach, lettuce, kale, pea pods, quinoa, avocado, broccoli, mangos, oranges, apples, carrots, almonds, dried apricots, chicken and salmon into the rest of the week’s menus.  In reality, the foods on this long list sound pretty tasty, and collectively they give the proof that I will not be able to cut back on eating if I am to avoid wasting them.  So let’s hope this walking experiment works and does so fairly quickly.  Otherwise, I can safely predict that “Only four hundred and eighty miles in six months to a new you” is not going to catch on as a popular weight loss formula.  Nor is, “Become a Big Foot. Gain one shoe size in only a few weeks.”