“I think I went once as a kid, and then maybe two or three times before the pandemic,” she says about her previous hiking experience. Emerson says she’d always wanted to be a regular hiker, but self-consciousness about her speed and size had held her back. “I really had this picture in my head of what the perfect hiker looked like, and that was just somebody that’s on the skinnier side,” Emerson says — “athletically built and really muscular.” Since the app’s review was so unhelpful, she and her friend started thinking that maybe the app wasn’t made for hikers like them. They joked about Emerson starting a guide of her own, featuring “chubby hiker reviews.” Emerson laughed at the idea. But that afternoon, she started an Instagram account using the name @chubbyhikerreviews. The description on her page reads: “Reviewing hiking trails in Maine and rating them on chubby hiker friendliness. Showing that anyone can be a hiker.” Now, more than a year later, 26-year-old Emerson’s body-positive hiking has helped her feel healthier than ever. “I started hiking in June of the pandemic and hiked all that summer,” says Emerson, who has since become licensed as a conditional clinical social worker. She lost 25 pounds by the fall of 2020, she says: “I wasn’t even trying to lose weight. I wasn’t on a diet or anything like that. It was just from being more active.” Emerson says she had some reservations when she started posting to the Instagram account, and she wasn’t sure about attempting many more hikes. She worried that her body was too big to be hiking. “The friends that I went with were all athletically built — and a lot smaller than I am,” she says. But she hopes others will benefit from her sharing her story and her hikes. RELATED: Fitness Pros Who Have a Totally Balanced Approach to Wellness
Getting Over Body Struggles
Body image can definitely be a barrier to being more active for a lot of people, says Paula Atkinson, a licensed clinical social worker in Washington, DC, who teaches body justice activism as a lecturer at George Washington University and has clinical expertise in helping people with food, eating, and body struggles. Many of her clients are learning to be body positive after years of an unhealthy relationship with exercise, she says. A big part of it is focusing on what you like to do and what your body can do, instead of what your body looks like, Atkinson says. It’s not about forcing yourself to do any specific type of movement. It’s about choosing something you love. “When you focus on ability, then health improves exponentially. When you focus on shape and weight, health decreases,” she says. For Emerson, the COVID-19 pandemic was a catalyst that helped her face her body struggles. She was having difficulty with depression, and spending so much more time indoors was not helping. She says she was desperate to get out of the house more. She thought spending some time in nature would help. RELATED: How to Handle Anxiety in the Time of COVID-19 And indeed, research shows that spending time outdoors is linked to many health benefits, including lower blood pressure and reduced stress levels, according to a review article published in the July-August 2018 issue of the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. For Emerson, feedback from her online community of Instagram followers was encouraging. She says she learned that a lot of would-be hikers were like her. People identified with the body-positive messages Emerson shared in her first @chubbyhikerreviews post — and they told her so. It gave her the boost she needed to keep going. “Maybe I should do this,” she says she thought. After that, Emerson would take on a new hike each week, mostly the ones rated “easy” on her hiking app, but sometimes challenging herself with ones rated “moderate,” she says. After each hike, she felt a sense of accomplishment. A year later, she says she feels stronger than ever: “I can feel it in my thighs. I’m like, yes, I actually have muscles here that I never used to have!” RELATED: How to Start a Self-Care Routine You’ll Follow
The Benefits of Hiking Went Way Beyond the Physical Ones
Emerson says she soon realized that her reviews were not just about physical health. She was commenting on body positivity and mental health, too. Now, she says, both topics are ones she’s really passionate about. Emerson suffers from both anxiety and depression, and she says hiking has helped her cope with both. “I was super depressed and I just needed to get out of my house,” she says. Hiking offered a healthy escape from the nonstop bad news during quarantine, she says. “It’s been incredibly healing for my depression and my anxiety.” “Just having this to look forward to gave me something else to focus on,” she says, which ultimately helped her get through the darker days of the pandemic. “It was so nice to go somewhere and have that peace.” Being a force in the body-positive hiking movement is also important to Emerson, she says. She wants to spread the message that people of any size can hike. Some hiking apparel companies, for example, don’t make gear in sizes big enough for plus-size hikers, she says. “There are people that want to get outside that are bigger than that.” Atkinson agrees. She points to a number of new size-inclusive hikers and hiking groups that are helping redefine what it means to have a hiking body. A group of 20 plus-sized women hiked Mount Kilimanjaro in 2019, documenting the trip on Instagram (their story is the subject of a new documentary). Body-positive ultrarunner Mirna Valerio has amassed more than 137,000 followers on her Instagram account, where she documents her hiking, biking, running, and other ventures. She does motivational speaking on the topic, teaches workshops, and is the author of a memoir, A Beautiful Work in Progress. Emerson says a big lesson has been that body-positive hiking is just as much about tuning in to what your body needs that day as it is about going up a mountain. Sometimes you resist the urge to stay home and just get out there, she says. But some days, she recognizes that the conditions aren’t safe to hike or she really doesn’t want to go at all, and that’s okay too. She’s learned to feel at peace with whatever choice she makes. “It’s a lot of just having grace for yourself,” she says.
Community Support Has Been Important
For Emerson, joining a Facebook group for other hikers in her area helped her stick with it, she says. The members of the group were encouraging. Some suggested places to hike and gear to buy, she says. And feedback from the group has helped Emerson find her voice in terms of talking about mental health and body positivity, especially as it relates to hiking. When she posts about how she’d like to see more size-inclusive options from hiking companies, hikers in her group agree, she says. “I realized I had a community of people that wanted to support me,” she says. “They’re not surprised that I’m doing this,” she says. “They’re like: Of course you can do this.” Lately, her commenters have even been urging her to take on Mount Katahdin, one of the highest peaks in Maine. She doesn’t feel ready just yet. But she’ll get there, she says. “Something in that range is going to be my next goal.”
